About Klaus Prior

Klaus Prior was born in 1945 in Wesel on the Lower Rhine. He leaves Germany as an 18-year-old and settles in eastern Switzerland.

In 1967 he began to study painting at the Kunstgewerbeschule St. Gallen. Three years later he moved to Ticino as a freelance artist. Klaus Prior deals with wood sculpturing, iron casting and painting. He lives and works in Ticino and West Allgäu.
Klaus Prior's art, his sculptures as well as his works on canvas and paper are created without previous sketch, without model, depending on size often in one operation, spontaneous and concentrated at the same time.
In a form of psychic automatism the present state of mind is visualized. The pictures reflect raw, intuitive sensations.

With spontaneous colors, impulsive gestures and swift brushstrokes, the artist, out of an inner necessity, outlines the silhouettes of his motifs.
In offensive outbursts beyond the formal boundaries, in the proportional overemphasis of heads, limbs, faces or gestures, in all those idiosyncratic stylistic devices, the unbacked traces of work continue to manifest as manifestos of the momentary expression.

Sculpting, he works mainly in wood, one of the oldest materials of artistic work ever (his iron sculptures are casts of wood sculptures).
Klaus Prior avoids the positioning of his characters in an episodic context, the addition of attributes, utensils or other references to a narrative context.
Prior's art is marked by the lasting memories of his childhood and youth in post-war Germany, the recognition of the thinness and fragility of man, coupled with the life experiences in a multinational industrial worker culture.

His paintings and sculptures speak of the constant encounter of man with pain, wounding and isolation.
Dr. Stefanie Dathe (excerpt)