Konrad Klapheck, the painter of enigmatic machines, dies

2023-08-08 16:57:31

In a Jewish home for the elderly in Düsseldorf, his hometown, the painter Konrad Klapheck died on the 30th, at the age of 88, who, suffering from Parkinson’s, had been away from his brushes for some time. In 1934 his father, the art historian Richard Klapheck, (who would die in 1939), had been fired by the Nazis from the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. The Second World War was spent by the son with his mother, Anna, also an art historian, in Leipzig, then frequently bombed. Already in the postwar period, he studied Fine Arts at the aforementioned Academy, where his mother was a teacher, and of which years later, continuing the saga, he would be too.

1955 marks the true beginning of his work. Rejecting the abstract temptation that Pollock or Wols represented, he then painted, as exactly as possible, a typewriter, which enthused his teacher, Bruno Goller. Many others would come later, and sewing machines (Lautréamont, Domínguez…), bicycles, cash registers, vacuum cleaners, irons, taps, shoe lasts, and other everyday objects, including motorcycles and bulldozers. All expressed in a meticulous, precise, dry style, sometimes reminiscent of the first Morandi, and sometimes German magical realism, and Lindner. Pictures like exact and disturbing enigmas, from which neither humor, nor eroticism, nor politics are absent, always with the memory of the flags and imposed heroes.

A visitor to Max Ernst’s Paris in 1954, and a friend of Richard Oelze and later of Magritte, in 1961 he made contact with the surrealist group in Paris, frequenting the gathering on La Promenade de Vénus. Already adopted by the group, he was present at “La Brèche” and “Coupure”. In 1965 he participated in “L’écart absolu”, the last collective, at L’Oeil, and André Breton prefaced the catalog of his solo show at Ileana Sonnabend. Benayoum, Jaguer and José Pierre also wrote about him. There Maeght exposed it first, and then Lelong. In other cities, George Staempfli, Alfred Schmela, Rudolf Zwirner, Arturo Schwarz, Sidney Janis, Ernst Beyeler…

The industrial side of his painting led to Klapheck being included in pop collectives in the 1960s, and later the hyperrealists took an interest in him. 1974 was the year of his retrospective at the Boymans in Rotterdam, which later traveled to the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Städtische Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf. Alcalá 31 exhibited it in Madrid in 2005. By then, without abandoning his machines, he had opened a new front, introducing the human figure: female nudes, jazz musicians (his youthful love), boxers, the silhouettes of colleagues and friends… In 2007, Hans UIrich Obrist published a book of conversations with him. Jewish consort by his marriage to Lilo Lang, after his tragic disappearance he would convert; his daughter Elisa is a rabbi, and his son David is also active in this field.