Since the 1950s, German painter Konrad Klapheck has been producing a rigorous body of work. The bulk of his extraordinarily focused artistic career comprises a continued painterly investigation of technological machines and everyday objects such as typewriters, sewing machines, and ventilators. The artist’s canvases, however, are not mere depictions; the objects Klapheck presents are subtly anthropomorphized and charged with psychological, social, and political meaning. A telephone, for example, takes on a playful, eroticized quality in one canvas, while a typewriter becomes a menacing object evocative of brute power in another. An artist’s artist, Klapheck has never painted according to fashions dictated by the art world; he is a painter guided by his own obsessions. However, his work bears a number of crucial relationships to the history of painting and to the artistic and intellectual concerns of postwar art. In its unexpected combination of deadpan depiction and evocative playfulness, Klapheck’s canvases forge an important link in twentieth-century art, melding elements from Surrealism and Pop Art with a singular painterly sensibility to create a uniquely influential body of work.
This long-overdue English-language monograph comprises an in-depth examination of Klapheck’s work, bringing together an extensive group of paintings that span the continued course of his career. The publication provides an overview of important paintings of technological devices and machinery, while also presenting examples of more recent evocative, figurative work.
