Peter Kaiser

Peter Kaiser
born Germany 1918; arrived Australia 1940; died France 1955

Fungus 1958
oil on canvas
Geelong Gallery
Gift of Charles Nodrum, 2018

Peter Kaiser studied art at the Berlin Academy before travelling to Australia in 1940 on the HMT Dunera, with a number of German nationals. After a period in detention, he was employed in an architectural firm in Sydney until the end of WWII. In the early 1950s, Kaiser married and shortly after he and his wife left for France, basing themselves in Tourrettes sur Loup.

By the mid-1950s Kaiser’s painterly approach was closely aligned with Taschisme, a French movement which involved the staining, layering, scoring and scratching of the painted surface to achieve energised and textural fields of abstract space. Fungus is from this significant period in Kaiser’s development, in which his work became more restrained with a greater focus on surface texture.