PETER KLASEN: NOWHERE ANYWHERE
June 2- July 8, 2006
Artist’s Opening Reception: Friday, June 2, 7 – 9 pm
M+B is pleased to present Nowhere Anywhere, an exhibition of photography by Paris-based artist Peter Klasen. Coming to Los Angeles after it’s inaugural exhibition at the Maison Européene de la Photographie in Paris in the Fall of 2006, this exhibition takes us—for the first time—into the fascinating world of the photos Klasen has taken over the past 30 years, which have served as the basis for the concretization of his paintings.
Since the late sixties, Peter Klasen has been obsessively and critically developing a personal pictorial vocabulary by appropriating photography in all its forms and manifestations. Using airbrush, collage or painted copies of photographs, these images invade the surface of the canvas and reflect Klasen's precise and personal take on the evolution of society. Like a seismograph, he takes readings from the constant production of daily images that signify our urban and social environment.
He quickly moves from mere quotation to a personal form of photographic appropriation, using his lens to produce an implacable inventory of our industrial and material urban aesthetic. Trucks, freight trains, industrial installations, ports, car parks, deserted and desolate places of labor, the anonymous zones on the fringes of our cities: these are the themes Klasen chooses to focus on during his many journeys between Paris, New York, Tokyo, Barcelona and Berlin. Klasen records the stereotyped signs and forms of everyday reality, extracting the essence of a general themes relating to the syndrome of solitude, imprisonment and death, as well as the sublimation of the body—subjects that continue to obsess him and nourish his work.
Peter Klasen's genius is to create a system of images that seems to reproduce the principle of modern thought: associative/disjunctive, reductive/one-dimensional, while simultaneously introducing that which is separable and complementary as part of the system itself: disorder with respect to order, freedom with respect to determinism, innocence with respect to repetition.
In 1960, Peter Klasen was one of the first artists to introduce the coldness of "New Figuration," looking critically at the images and objects of our daily lives. Klasen has exhibited worldwide and his work is included in over sixty museum and public collections around the world, most notably the MOMA in New York, The Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum für moderne Kunst in Vienna, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Ludwig Collection in Cologne. This is Klasen’s first solo exhibtion at M+B.
Dates of Exhibition: June 2 - July 8, 2006
Opening Reception with the Artist: Friday, June 2, 7-9pm
Gallery Address: 612 North Almont Drive, Los Angeles, California 90069
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday from 10a-5p
For more information, contact Shannon Richardson at M+B at 310-550-0050 or email to shannon@mbfala.com
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M+B
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069
TEL 310 550 0050
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