Since the 1980s, Hahne has been one of the tone-setting artists in Swedish abstract painting. He himself writes as follows, in a text for the exhibition at the art gallery in Hishult in 2014: "Creating something new without relating to what has been done before is not possible for me. I connect to a tradition of non-figurative image making that has its beginnings in the early 20th century.”
A method that often recurs in Hahne's artwork is the repetition of simple forms where the works outwardly have the same basic form, but are individual in color and execution. "The differences grow in consideration and their different appeals become apparent," writes Hahne. "The paintings are not narrative but of course contain my experiences, anything else would be unthinkable. Is it possible, fruitful to paint a number of square fields again, or is it to be considered an already explored area? I have no doubt, and I trust that my paintings provide an answer.”
"The images often come to me as performances. These develop in the artisanal work, but sometimes also through a kind of mental displacement". Hahne cites the Austrian writer Peter Handke as a source of inspiration, whose texts coincide with the artist's own thoughts about viewing and the wordless charge in images.
Peter Hahne was born in 1955 in Arboga, today he lives and works in Malmö. During the late 1970s he studied at the art schools in Stockholm and Copenhagen. Today he is represented in the collections of all the major Swedish museums.