Konrad Klapheck attracted attention early on. Already in 1959 Alfred Schmela showed pictures of him in his Düsseldorf gallery; he was 24 years old then. Exhibitions followed with Arturo Schwarz in Milan and with Rudolf Zwirner in Essen, then in Cologne. The Kestner Society in Hanover and the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal dedicated their first individual presentations to him in 1966. And from an early age he commented on himself and his work in texts. One is called “The Machine and I” in 1963: “I wanted to contrast the blurry with something hard and precise, and the lyrical abstraction with a prosaic superobjectivity.” Voilà, the apparatus. The following is an enumeration of how concrete poetry is:
“Typewriters
sewing machines
phones and sirens
water taps and showers
shoe tree
bicycle bells”
With that his program was outlined, beyond realistic or new-objective depiction, this side of surrealistic deep diving of the soul. He concluded: “I painted the machine to do something special, to immortalize myself in a distinctive way. Instead, it has led me to the realization of impermanence and taught me the unimportance of my person. Should I be mad at her for that? I don’t think so, because getting to know life means being able to endure it.”
The young man, who thus shows the essence of his artistry, was only 28 years old. He’ll do it seriously, for life. His – first – typewriter from 1955, with a suspiciously tightly clamped white sheet of paper, was still simply called “typewriter”; Andy Warhol was still dreaming of his early “type writer” in New York.
The typewriter, among other devices, will undergo various metamorphoses in Klapheck’s work, under very different names, that too. In 1964, a vertical iron was called “The House Dragon”; a related model that fires jets of steam from all nine pores on its underside bears the title “The Mother-in-Law” in 1967.
transformation of the objects
Konrad Klapheck’s supposedly sober machine painting stirs up very sober associations in the viewer. This has to do with strange views from below, with shifted perspectives, with strong colors in front of monochrome backgrounds. He wasn’t interested in hyperrealism, not in outdoing realistic reproduction, for example in photography. Rather, he moved in the imagination of a Giorgio de Chirico or René Magritte. He took ideas from Surrealism, perhaps from Man Ray’s spiked iron object “Le cadeau” or from Marcel Duchamp’s (almost) ready-made “Le roue de bicyclette” on his kitchen stool. But Klapheck wittily christened his meticulously painted bicycles “The dubiousness of fame” or “Fate”. He is concerned with the transformation of objects, which are perhaps sculptures, into paintings.
Klapheck was infatuated with the Renaissance, northern by Hans Holbein, southern by Raffael. This is understandable in many of his pictures, as far as their subjects are from the old masters. And he had his own narration about it, like about his large format Supermother, which he worked on from 1969 to 1992. It is a mysterious drilling or milling machine, on the needle of which a sharp cone of light falls – a writing machine; whoever thinks of Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” is probably not mistaken.
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