Peter Klasen Retrospective at Centre d'art contemporain de Meymac

The Centre d'art contemporain de Meymac in France, known for prescient exhibitions like Julian Opie in 2000, is hosting a summer retrospective of German artist Peter Klasen. The show spans his career from the 1960s to recent works, featuring paintings, collages, installations, and photographs. Early works juxtapose fragmented motifs—women's legs, cigarettes, cars, syringes—using slide projection and airbrush for a mechanical, seductive finish. Subsequent series depict truck backs, factory doors, and prison grids with orthogonal lines, revealing societal inhumanity through hyperrealistic precision. 1970s works incorporate neon and electric meters as collages. Recent paintings reference cinema, amplifying their allure. The exhibition ends with photographs that lack the impact of his earlier hyperrealist-analytic synthesis. Most pieces are from private collections, with some from public ones like Mnam, Fnac, and the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg. The retrospective runs from July 9 to November 5, 2006.