The renowned artist Peter Klasen, a pioneer of the Nouvelle Figuration and Figuration Narrative movements in the early 1960s, will present an exhibition at the Galerie Eva Hober from March 14 through May 11, 2018, of a series of recent works created in homage to Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and Kurt Schwitters.

Installed at her new gallery space in Paris' 8th arrondissement since October last year, Eva Hober is delighted to announce her first exhibition of work by Peter Klasen.

Peter Klasen (born in Lubeck, Germany, on August 18, 1935) has lived and worked in Paris since 1959. A socially-committed artist, he is known for his "tableaux-rencontres"— a blend of collage and photography, his medium of choice, in which he reinterprets imagery taken from advertising, movie posters, and magazines using airbrushing techniques to create works inspired by urban reality, its codes and conventions. In his work, Klasen warns of the dangers posed by the media and its impact on our world.

Themes such as consumer society, obsessions, madness, power relations, imprisonment, current events, cinema, and the human body recur in the work of Peter Klasen, who has blazed a trail for artists today who call society into question.

In 2010, Klasen began a series of homages to great masters in which his works enter into a dialogue with artists such as Duchamp, Friedrich, Léger, Mondrian, Picasso, Schwitters, da Vinci, El Greco, and Tintoretto.

Both in his pictorial compositions and the themes he explores, the influence of the great masters is omnipresent in Klasen’s work, and he now pays tribute to them once again in a new series of works that have never previously been exhibited, dedicated to Malevich, Mondrian, and Schwitters.

For his exhibition at the Galerie Eva Hober, Klasen subverts the codes and references that have underscored his own painting practice in fragmented compositions in which the legacies of the past are given new life in extravagant original creations.

In the era of digital technology and sanitized photographic retouching, Peter Klasen goes against the current with his combination of acrylic paint, digital printing, collage, typography, photography, logotypes, pastel highlights, and neons. These works testify to his interest in the deconstruction and recycling of pre-existing forms through the use of quotation, pastiche, and parody.