1957–1985
Peter Klashorst was born on 11 February 1957 in Santpoort, near Haarlem. He liked to say that he started selling paintings at the age of eight, going door to door, and that “nothing really changed since then”.
The Rietveld Academy
He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In 1979 he moved to the newly founded Audiovisual department, which a former teacher remembered as a disorganised mess, but one that suited the wide interests of Klashorst and his classmates: they published a magazine, made comics and even started their own pirate broadcaster.
With fellow student Maarten van der Ploeg he formed the new wave band Soviet Sex, with Klashorst on bass guitar. The band became popular in the Amsterdam squatter scene and released the LP Happy End in 1982, after which it split up. In the mid-1990s it made a small comeback with singer Ellen ten Damme.
A New Wild One
It was painting, however, that made his name. Shortly after he started working as an independent artist he received the Buning Brongers Prize (1982) and the Royal Subsidy for Free Painting (1983).
His colourful, wild canvases, full of references to popular culture and art history, fitted seamlessly into a new European movement: the Neue Wilden. In West Germany young painters such as Walter Dahn, Martin Kippenberger and Jiří Georg Dokoupil had reacted against minimal art, pop art and conceptual art with figurative, expressive and colourful painting. In Italy, France and the United States similar movements emerged. In the Netherlands Klashorst presented himself through a series of successful exhibitions as an important representative of this international movement, and partly thanks to his frequent media appearances he quickly became a nationally known New Wild One.