About
Peter Klashorst
Most likely one of the best painters nowadays from The Netherlands
Klashorst was born in Santpoort and graduated cum laude from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in the early nineteen eighties. During this period a new art movement arose in Europe, namely “The New Wild Ones”. Klashorst became one of its leading personalities. In 1983 he received a prestigious Dutch Royal award (Koninklijke Subsidie voor de Vrije Schilderkunst) from Queen Beatrix.
In 1987 Klashorst was one of the initiators of “After Nature”, an international art collective that aimed at reinventing painting and bringing art back to society and taking it out of the official highbrow art world. Famous and notorious for their joint performances on streets and in nightclubs, they toured the world and were a notorious phenomenon of their time. The collective “After Nature”, including co-founders Klashorst and the artists Roberto Cabot, George Dokoupil, Donker brothers and Ernst Voss, opposed the prevailing non-figurative style and was interested in just painting what they saw.
During this period Klashorst could often be found in New York’s East Village art scene where he showed his work in galleries at Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for instance the Daniel Newburg Gallery and the International With Monument Gallery. He hang out with Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, and Jeff Koons still in the beginning of career.
Tired and disillusioned with the whole commercial art world and all the time consuming networking in expensive restaurants, he started travelling to distant places without an art market or top galleries. Just as his heroes the poet Arthur Rimbaud and the painter Paul Gauguin he went to Africa full of romantic ideas, but of course the harsh reality of the African city life is no picnic. During this time he exhibited in the National Museum of Kenya and gave lectures and workshops to local artists and street kids, but was also arrested and imprisoned a few times for his uncompromising sculptures and paintings.
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Exhibitions:
January 2019.
Design Today
December 2019.
Now and Tomorrow
March 2019.
Life without Design
October 2019.
Design Today
February 2019.
Now and Tomorrow
December 2019.
Life without Design