Artist of the Day, September 19, 2024: Konrad Klaphec, a German painter, designer and graphic artist (#2115)

Konrad Klapheck (1935 –  2023) was a German painter and graphic artist whose style of painting combined features of Surrealism and Neorealism.

Konrad Klapheck was born in Düsseldorf to arts historians and professors Richard and Anna Klappheck (née Strümpell, daughter of Adolf Strümpell). From 1954 to 1956 Konrad studied painting under Bruno Goller at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Klapheck's works of the mid-1950s are in a magic realist style that became more idiosyncratic when he painted the first of his typewriters. His subsequent paintings, often large in scale, are precise and seemingly realistic depictions of technical equipment, machinery, and everyday objects, but strangely alienated; they are "monumental, amusingly absurd and sexually suggestive".

Klapheck's subjects through the years included (in order of introduction) typewriters, sewing machines, water taps and showers, telephones, irons, shoes, keys, saws, car tires, bicycle bells, and clocks. Influenced by Duchamp, Man Ray, and Max Ernst, Klapheck's "ironic treatment of everyday mechanics" prefigured pop art in its magnification of the trivial. He was also close to French Surrealism and André Breton wrote his last published text about a Klapheck exhibition at Galerie Sonnabend in 1965.

Between 1992 and 2002, he painted friends, colleagues, and celebrities from the international art scene. He became a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1979.

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Konrad Klapheck

Typewriter, 1955

Fertility (formerly fantasy machine), 1960

The sex bomb and her companion, 1964

The beautiful housewife, 1967

The smile of the augurs, 1968

The Power of Oblivion, 1968

Infatuation, 1969

The glory and misery of reforms, 1971 drawing

Zipper, 1974

The Master Thinker (formerly Small Typewriter), 1976-77

The glory and misery of reforms, 1976-77

The Super Nut (formerly Drilling Machine II), 1977

  A little hope, 1978

The Legislator (formerly- Large Key Machine), 1980

 The dubiousness of fame (formerly Bicycle I), 1980

 Steam iron (mother in law), 1980

The Chosen One, 1981

Autobiography, 1983

 Davis Cup, 1983

 Mother's prayers, 1983

The question of the Sphinx, 19855

 L'homme dans la femme 1986

 Lamento No 11, 1986

Drawing for Le Présage, 1987

The Sacrifice, 1989

The thwarted apostle, 1992

The potent grandfather, 1998

The impatience of the Sphinx, 1998