KLAUS PETER BREHMER OPERA

Klaus Peter Brehmer was a painter, graphic artist, and German filmmaker. From 1971 to 1997, he was also a professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. Through his art, Klaus Peter Brehmer expressed his political tendencies and his social and civic commitment. He was born in Berlin on September 12, 1938. He graduated as an engraver at the end of the 1950s. In the following years, he studied graphic arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he also worked for several years until 1963.
After a year of residency in Paris at the studio of Stanley William Hayter, he returns to Berlin and dedicates himself to various types of graphics. During this period, his folded graphics, the stamp series, and cinematographic works were produced.
Influenced by Pop Art and the political rebellion of the young generations of the '60s, Klaus Peter Brehmer will develop a new form of artistic language that gives greater prominence to material objects such as architectural elements or other objects of everyday life. Thus, around 1963, the so-called banal graphics were born, in which everyday motifs from advertising and mass media were depicted, such as nude women, cars, or astronauts.
In the mid-1960s, Brehmer began to reproduce the stamp in his prints, which the artist himself defined as an authoritative organism with a cultural definition of power. From the mid-1960s, the artist became, along with Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and Wolf Vostell, an important representative of capitalist realism.
In the 1970s, Brehmer developed a new group of works, the so-called schematic work, in which colors, maps, and statistics were elaborated. In these works, he deals with the interpretation and meaning of color as a symbol (Farbengeografien, Ideale Landschaft, Farbmuster) and created large-scale charts and maps to represent fascism (Hitler's Rede, 1973), the communist threat (Lokalisierung von Rotwerten, 1972), and environmental damage (Skyline).
In the last twenty-five years of his life, he dedicated himself to teaching. In particular, from 1971 to 1997, he was a professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, one of the cities that adopted him during his career. Additionally, in 1987 and 1988, he was a lecturer at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, another experience that allowed him to gain international recognition.
Klaus Peter Brehmer dies in Hamburg in 1997.