Peter Klashorst

Peter Klashorst (born 1957 in Santpoort, died 2024 in Amsterdam) was a Dutch painter who also worked as a sculptor and photographer. He drew attention in the art world with a distinctive style, and his reputation was also shaped by a free-living lifestyle that made headlines in the Dutch press. His work sits within contemporary figurative painting and is notable for the way it portrays people from other cultures, often with a clear social dimension.

His career was closely tied to Africa and Southeast Asia. He painted and photographed young women in several African countries, which in 2000 led to his arrest in Senegal, a predominantly Muslim country, where he was charged with soliciting prostitution, encouraging debauchery and producing obscene images. According to the sources, he secured his release by bribing officials and then fled to Gambia. He later spent long periods in Nairobi, Mombasa in Kenya and Bangkok in Thailand. Many of his photographs and paintings resemble those of Paul Gauguin, and his images of local people often carry a social comment.

He was based in Amsterdam, in the Tabakspanden on the Spuistraat, though he also produced work in cities such as Bangkok, Mombasa and Phnom Penh. In 2011 he held one of his last self-organised shows at Tuol Sleng, the former Khmer Rouge prison known as S-21, in Cambodia. The set of around fifty paintings honoured the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime, and the exhibition received worldwide press coverage. An authorised biography, Rey Klashorst, by Robert Vuijsje, appeared in 2005, and a more extensive book on his art, ideas and life was published in 2007 to mark twenty-five years of his work as a painter. He received the Johan en Titia Buning-Brongers Prize in 1982 and the Royal Prize for Free Painting in the Netherlands in 1983.