ANP KippaPeter Klashorst
NOS Nieuws•gisteren, 00:10
Artist Peter Klashorst has died at the age of 67. This was confirmed by his advocate Edwin Suer to NOS.
Klashorst was known for his colorful artworks with coarse brushstrokes, including many portraits and nudes. He was a household name in the art world, especially in the 80s and 90s.
Klashorst, real name Peter van de Klashorst, was born in Santpoort, but moved to Amsterdam at a young age. “I think I was 15 when friends squatted a building next to the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. But I wanted to go to Amsterdam,” he said last year in The Parool“There was a building empty on the Ten Katemarkt. All you needed was a crowbar to open the door and then you could get in, it was that simple.”
Collective
He went to study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and co-founded an illegal club and an illegal TV station. He was also the bassist for the new wave band Soviet Sex. In the late eighties, Klashorst began to gain more fame as an artist. He founded the artist collective After Nature, which did not want to make abstract expressionist art, but more “classical themes” such as nude portraits and landscapes.
The collective, which was located in the Amsterdam Spuistraat, fell apart in 1995. Klashorst then continued on his own. Although he regularly changed his painting style, his works remained mostly colorful and the subject was usually clearly recognizable.
When the number of squatted houses in Amsterdam decreased and the rents of houses shot up, the artist moved to Africa. In Senegal he painted portraits of naked women, among other things. This led to his arrest in 2000 for, among other things, inciting prostitution and making obscene images.
Klashorst spent three weeks in jail, was released after bribing officials and then left the country. In 2003 he was also arrested in Gambia for “making obscene paintings”.
Thailand
Klashorst spent the last years of his life living in Thailand and Cambodia, among other places. He announced he had HIV more than ten years ago. Later, he struggled with lymphoma.
His publisher and good friend Jaap Holtzapffel was the first to announce that the artist was not doing well in recent weeks. First he was admitted to Germany and later he was taken to a hospital in the Netherlands. Holtzapffel does not report what the artist died of.
Klashorst himself says he never got rich from his work, but that didn’t bother him much. “Art, that’s my drug,” he told Het Parool last year during a visit to Amsterdam. “Making art makes me so happy that the world around me doesn’t exist. What I had as a child, I still have now.”
