Peter Klasen, the founding artist in the Figuration narrative movement, has always used photography, and in the beginning of his career, his photography even served as raw material for his painting. It was not until 2005 that he decided to show his photographs as an essential part of his work, if not to say as complete works in themselves, during a retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie curated by Jean-Luc Monterosso. The principal focus of his photographic work is the city and industrial landscape, but he has also made digital prints on fabric, often combined with neon lights, bringing his interests in photography and painting together in one work. Klasen states of himself, ‘I am a documentarian of the urban reality, a reality that is inescapably linked to the industrialised objects of our Western civilisation, which has become one of my preoccupations.’ He goes on: ‘The photos that I take constitute the first stage in an approach to reality. It is a veritable investigation of the real though the lens.’This exhibition proposes three complete series of works, photographs of the industrial world, refineries, factories, industrial wastelands, as well as a series made in Havana in 2006; also included are recent works and Klasen’s photomontages on fabric.

Pascale Le Thorel, exhibition curator