BERLIN.- Haus am Kleistpark today opened Schwaananien, a solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Peter Klare, whose work moves freely between painting, photography, sculpture and installation. On view through September 13, 2026, the exhibition presents an expansive body of work in which color, form and materiality become ways of rethinking how images are experienced in space.
At the heart of the exhibition are Klare’s monumental flower paintings. Their large scale and immersive presence transform painting into something physical, almost architectural. Rather than simply presenting floral images, the works draw visitors into an atmosphere of color, light and movement, creating spaces that feel both real and imagined.
The new works are connected to Klare’s recent return to en plein air painting. At a time when digital and AI-generated images increasingly shape how reality is seen and understood, Klare turns back to direct, sensory contact with the world. His paintings do not aim to reproduce nature in a conventional way; instead, they open up emotional and visual spaces where inner and outer landscapes seem to merge.
The exhibition also includes photographic works that complicate the boundary between image and reality. In the series Silver, Klare uses his own analog photographs of cities and landscapes, altering them with silver pigments, drawing and painterly interventions. The original documentary clarity of the photographs is softened, interrupted and transformed.
In another group of works, historical photographs taken by Klare’s grandfather in Schwaan are brought together with the artist’s own fragmentary forms, which refer to American Hard-Edge painting. Past and present overlap, personal memory meets abstraction, and familiar images are pushed into new visual territory.
Klare also extends painting into the realm of sculpture. In works such as the Shapes series, canvases become three-dimensional bodies, shifting between picture surface, object and installation. Architectural and amorphous forms appear as painterly volumes, emphasizing the tactile quality of his practice. Klare’s works are meant not only to be seen, but felt.
Schwaananien follows these transitions between surface, object and space. Forms, colors and materials reappear throughout the exhibition, changing their meaning as they move from one context to another. The result is an exhibition that resists fixed interpretation and keeps perception in motion.
Peter Klare was born in Jena in 1969. He 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, he was awarded a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York. Since the mid-1990s, his work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and projects in Germany and abroad. He lives and works in Berlin.
An artist talk with Peter Klare and Steffen Siegel, Professor of Theory and History of Photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, will take place on Saturday, August 29, at 4 p.m. A finissage tour with Peter Klare and Franziska Schmidt will be held on Sunday, September 13, at 4 p.m.
Peter Klare: Schwaananien is on view from July 3 to September 13, 2026, at Haus am Kleistpark, Grunewaldstr. 6–7, 10823 Berlin. The venue is open Tuesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
