German painter Konrad Klapheck died in his sleep on Sunday July 30 in Düsseldorf at the age of 88. He had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for several years and had stopped painting.
He was born in Düsseldorf on February 10, 1935, to parents who were both art historians. But his father, Richard, was expelled by the Nazis from the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf in 1934 and died shortly before the war. Having survived with his mother the bombings of Leipzig, where they had taken refuge, Konrad Klapheck returned to his hometown in 1945. Enrolled in 1954 at the Academy of Fine Arts, he showed his interest in surrealism by visiting Max Ernst in Paris that same year. He then discovered artistic news: “I knew Pollock and Wols, I flirted with the informal, the tachisme, the dripping”, he said, in 2005, about this. But, rather than blending into this current, he radically opposes it.
At the age of 20, in 1955, he decided to paint a typewriter as accurately as possible. The mechanical subject and the smooth and neutral manner are the opposite of the celebration of the gesture and the unconscious that American action painting and European gestural abstraction then claim to claim. He was then one of the first to confront it, and to inscribe the omnipotence and omnipresence of machines in art, preceding in this by a few years the new Parisian realism and the New York pop art which assert themselves from 1960. If he is aware of what these artists have in common with him, he nevertheless remains at a distance: “I got on well with Klein, with Arman. But they didn’t invite me to join them,” he said.
It does not matter to him, because his first personal exhibition at the Schmela gallery, still in Düsseldorf, in 1959, is a success. He imposes a style and an iconography: representing irons, sewing machines, punching machines, gas masks or Swiss army knives with the precision of an engineer, enlarged on canvases of a format much larger than these objects and on impeccable monochrome backgrounds . No missing power cords or metal cogs and joints. The connection with Duchamp’s “celibate machines” is obvious, but no less so than that with the machinery for lacerating the condemned described by Kafka in The Penal Colony (1919). Without ever giving in to pathos, Klapheck invents the ironic art of technical cruelty.
Surprise and discomfort
Meeting André Breton in 1961, he found in him a collector and a defender: Breton prefaced his exhibition at the Ileana Sonnabend gallery in Paris in 1965, included him in his choice of the ten most representative young artists of the time and the invited to participate in the exhibition “L’Ecart absolu”, the last he designed before his death.
The surrealist tone of the work is all the more noticeable as Klapheck gives his canvases titles that De Chirico or Magritte could have used: The Will to Power for a calculator, The Voice of Conscience for a machine tool, Splendor and misery of the Reformation for a bulldozer. The connections with narrative figuration – especially with Télémaque – and with hyperrealism are also strong. He then exhibited frequently in Germany, Paris and, sometimes, in New York.
The effect of strangeness then weakening, Klapheck, who in turn became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in his hometown, was less present on the international scene from the end of the 1970s, until the appearance of a new work in the early 1990s. He who had always drawn nudes from models abandoned his dangerous mechanics to compose from these nude studies. He places them in violent and provocative scenes, sometimes implausible: circus and cabaret performances, but also erotic pleasures in a kitchen or a cemetery.
If the drawing and the structure are strictly and at length calculated, the pictorial execution is more free and allusive than before. By other means, his painting therefore once again arouses surprise and uneasiness. A second time, he took the risk of standing apart, but his notoriety was now established, and exhibitions started again at the Daniel Lelong gallery in Paris and Zurich, and in museums, for retrospectives, at the Musée d’art modern and contemporary Geneva in 2004, to that of Strasbourg in 2005 and, more recently, to that of La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland in 2019. The latter was titled “Venus ex Machina”, which sums up its trajectory well. .