Petra Kleinherne - Biography

Petra Kleinherne came to Australia from Germany in 1981 and since that time has lived and worked in Melbourne. She studied painting privately, then Visual Arts at Victoria University (2006), and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Painting from Monash University (2010).

Colour and the landscape drive her painting, man made structures and the figure may appear. The work lies between abstraction and figuration. It is process driven and is transformed by the alchemy of oil paint, and unexpected results happen through an interplay of the viscosity of paint, the brush and the canvas. The works happens spontaneously without regard for a certain outcome.

Transformations is Kleinherne’s second Solo exhibition at Jacob Hoerner Galleries’ New Carlton premises (2022, 2021) following on from an initial online Solo Exhibition (2020) and her inclusion in other online Group presentations in recent years. Kleinherne has also had solo exhibitions with the German Embassy in Canberra (2018), the Goethe Institute in Melbourne (2014/15), as well as consistently participating 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 and research Kleinherne undertook a residency in Germany and Croatia in 2019, as well as in France in 2017, stemming from these International residencies and travel her works are in Private Collections in Australia, Germany and France.