BERLIN.- At Haus am Kleistpark, Peter Klare’s exhibition Schwaananien brings painting, photography and sculpture into close conversation, tracing the ways an image can move off the wall, occupy space and challenge the way viewers understand what they are seeing.

On view through September 13, 2026, the exhibition gathers several strands of the Berlin-based artist’s practice, from monumental flower paintings and manipulated photographs to sculptural works made from canvas. Rather than treating these media as separate categories, Klare allows forms, colors and materials to migrate between them, creating a body of work that feels deliberately fluid.

At the heart of the exhibition are large-scale floral paintings whose size gives them an almost architectural presence. Filling entire walls, the works are designed to be experienced physically as much as visually, drawing the viewer into fields of color, light and atmosphere.

The paintings also mark Klare’s recent return to working en plein air. In a moment when digital imagery and AI-generated pictures increasingly mediate the way the world is seen, the artist has turned toward a more immediate encounter with his surroundings. For Klare, painting becomes less a matter of reproducing what is visible than of creating a space in which perception, memory and sensation can overlap.

His flowers are therefore not straightforward representations. They hover between the observed and the imagined, evoking places that feel both real and remembered. Inner and outer landscapes begin to merge, giving the works the quality of recollection rather than documentation.

That tension between reality and constructed image runs throughout Schwaananien.





In the photographic series Silver, Klare begins with his own analog photographs of cities and landscapes, then disrupts their apparent documentary certainty with silver pigment, drawing and layers of paint. The original scene remains present, but its status as a record of reality becomes unstable.

A similar process unfolds in the Collages series. Here, historical photographs taken by Klare’s grandfather in Schwaan are combined with fragments from the artist’s own work, including forms that reference American Hard-Edge painting. Different periods, scales and visual languages collide, allowing personal history and painterly abstraction to occupy the same image.

The exhibition’s title itself points toward this meeting of memory, place and invention.

Klare’s recurring shapes also leave the picture plane entirely. In works such as the Shapes series, canvas becomes a sculptural material, while other pieces operate as three-dimensional paintings suspended somewhere between object, image and installation. Architectural fragments and amorphous bodies extend painting into the surrounding room.

This insistence on material presence is central to Klare’s work. His surfaces and structures are intended not simply to be looked at, but to suggest touch, weight and physical sensation. In an increasingly disembodied visual culture, the artist emphasizes the tactile qualities of pigment, canvas and constructed form.

The exhibition follows those transitions closely: from flat surface to object, from photograph to painting, and from image to spatial experience. Motifs reappear in altered forms, refusing to settle into fixed meanings. Instead, Klare keeps perception in motion.

Born in Jena in 1969, Klare studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, where he was a master student from 1992 to 1996. He also studied in Montevideo and at the University of California, Los Angeles, receiving his Master of Fine Arts in 1998. In 2020, he received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York. Since the mid-1990s, his work has appeared in numerous exhibitions and projects in Germany and abroad. He lives and works in Berlin.

Among the works featured in Schwaananien are Untitled (Tree) and Untitled (Expanse), both from the 2021 Collages series; the monumental oil painting Untitled No. 3 from 2026; the sculptural work Zweig from 2009; and Silverlake, a 2017 work from the Silver series combining silver-pigment gouache with photography.

An artist talk with Klare and Steffen Siegel, Professor of Theory and History of Photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, will take place on August 29 at 4 p.m. A closing-day tour with Peter Klare and Franziska Schmidt is scheduled for September 13 at 4 p.m.

Peter Klare: Schwaananien is on view at Haus am Kleistpark, Grunewaldstr. 6–7, Berlin, through September 13, 2026. The venue is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.