Name: Peter Klare | Schwaananien
Start: 2026-07-03T11:00:00
End: 2026-09-13T18:00:00
Location: Haus am Kleistpark

Berlin-based artist Peter Klare takes a free, visually sensuous approach to painting, applying colors and forms to oversized canvases with broad, painterly gestures, detaching them from the painting surface, transferring them into space, transforming canvases into sculptural forms, or covering photographic images with pigments. Recurring elements appear as fragments, contours, or volumes, shifting between surface and object. This creates connections that restructure perception and become experiential as open states.

At the center of the exhibition are monumental flower paintings whose wall-filling presence transforms the medium of painting into an immediate physical and spatial experience, literally drawing visitors into the image. The large-format works tie in with Klare’s recent return to en plein air painting.

In a present where digital and AI-based visual worlds increasingly shape reality, Klare seeks direct, sensory contact with the world. Color, light, and atmosphere become the starting point for a form of painting that creates not so much representations as it opens up spaces of resonance.

The floral imagery appears both imagined and real, much like memories of a place of longing where inner and outer landscapes merge.

The shift between reality and image is also evident, among other things, in Klare’s other photographic series. In *Silver*, Klare works with cityscapes and landscapes he photographed himself and developed using analog processes, which he then manipulates with silver pigments, drawn interventions, and painterly overlays. The documentary clarity is dissolved.

In the series *Collagen*, historical photographs taken by Klare’s grandfather in Schwaan meet the artist’s own fragmentary works, which reference American hard-edge painting. Past and present pictorial spaces layer upon one another, scales shift, and personal approaches merge with painterly constructs.

From these recurring outlines and forms, in turn, sculptural works emerge from canvases—such as the *Shapes* series or those figures that exist as three-dimensional paintings, straddling the line between picture support, object, and installation. Architectural elements or amorphous bodies appear as painterly volumes and extend the surface into space. The tactile and haptic play a central role in this process. Clear, precise works are meant to “feel” right. They insist on materiality in an increasingly disembodied visual world.

The exhibition “Schwaananien” explores the transitions between the picture plane, the object, and space.

Shapes, colors, and materials recur in different contexts, continually changing their form in the process. This creates a cohesive body of work that does not fix perception but keeps it in motion.

Peter Klare, born in Jena in 1969, studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich—where he was a master student from 1992 to 1996—as well as in Montevideo and at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received his Master of Fine Arts in 1998. In 2020, Klare was awarded a fellowship from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York. Since the mid-1990s, he has participated in numerous exhibitions and projects both in Germany and abroad; the artist lives and works in Berlin.