Petra Kleinherne - Biography

Paintings by Petra Kleinherne are evocative & engaging explorations of colour and form. Structures and the figure within her abstracted landscapes & places may appear, an amalgam of memories of the mind’s eye & real life locations. In terms of process Kleinherne starts spontaneously without regard for a certain outcome and yet over time her visual ideas coalesce to arrive at resolved balanced alluring works. In essence these are expressionist paintings driven by feeling, emotion and whim while also being shaped by aesthetic considerations and a revelry in the alchemy of paint leading to striking sensory compositions.

Kleinherne came to Australia from Germany in 1981 and since that time has lived and worked in Melbourne. At first she studied painting privately for a number of years then formally at Victoria University (2006) that was then followed by the completion of a Bachelor of Fine Arts Painting at Monash University (2010).

Kleinherne has had two significant Solo exhibitions with Jacob Hoerner Galleries, Transformations (2022) & Farbräume (2021), as well as having her works included in Spring 1883 (2024) at the Windsor Hotel in Melbourne. In addition to these presentations Kleinherne had a Solo Exhibition at the German Embassy in Canberra in 2018 and at the Goethe Institute in Melbourne in 2014 into 2015 having also participated in group shows at a variety of galleries since her first foray into establishing her Artistic Practice at the Summer Academy for Visual Arts in Salzburg Austria in 1998. Outside of exhibiting & study Kleinherne undertook a residency in Germany & Croatia in 2019, as well as in France in 2017, stemming from these International residencies & travel her works are in Private Collections in Australia, Germany & France.