Oil on canvas. Signed and dated on the reverse. Titled on the stretcher. 90 x 70 cm.
• "Die Technik der Eroberung" (The Technique of Conquest) - a masterly staged surreal play of spatial confusion as a symbol of a sensual-erotic quest. • He tells a story of seduction in subtle colors with surprising accents in green and red. • Klapheck is regarded as both the inventor and master of the "machine image", which he sees as a mirror of human existence. • Klapheck's oeuvre, consisting exclusively of character objects, has anticipated Pop Art and Photorealism since the 1950s. • Shown in several important Klapheck exhibitions since 1966, among others, at the Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam/Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1974/75) and the Kunsthalle Hamburg/Kunsthalle Tübingen (1985/86). • Part of a private collection in Southern Germany for over 50 years. The work is registered in the artist's archive under number 146. LITERATURE: Josè Pierre, Konrad Klapheck, Colgne 1970, no. 146. Konrad Klapheck and the unique "sound" of his pictures Works of art are not only products but also mirrors of human imagination. They are characters that not only reveal the artist's pictorial language and characteristic sense of form and color but also provide insight into the spiritual and emotional world of their creators. In an interview, the Hamburg painter Daniel Richter once emphasized how underestimated and difficult it is for a painter to find his own "sound". It is about this unmistakably individual character, the intrinsic value of form and content gained from the same painterly means of color and canvas. The struggle to fill the white canvas, at least in part, with something new and unique. That characteristic feeling that resonates in every work and gives the entire painterly oeuvre of an artist its unmistakable character. As soon as an artist succeeds in freeing himself from the shackles of art-historical traditions and is confident enough to dare to create something that is completely his own, the result is usually of a very special quality. In this sense, Konrad Klapheck is an outstanding artist. The objects he placed on the canvas in a surreal, hyper-representational manner resemble modern symbols due to their great associative density and have a completely unmistakable character and incomparable modernity, both in terms of form and content. From the 1950s onwards, Klapheck brought his very own "sound" to the canvas in a perfectionistic fine painting style. He remained true to figuration in an environment dominated by gestural abstraction and, in the combination of painted subject matter, alienating elements, and human-emotional titles, preserved personal and existential worlds ranging from childhood memories to abstract ideas of the afterlife. Konrad Klapheck and the unique "sound" of his pictures Works of art are not only products but also mirrors of human imagination. They are characters that not only reveal the artist's pictorial language and characteristic sense of form and color but also provide insight into the spiritual and emotional world of their creators. In an interview, the Hamburg painter Daniel Richter once emphasized how underestimated and difficult it is for a painter to find his own "sound". It is about this unmistakably individual character, the intrinsic value of form and content gained from the same painterly means of color and canvas. The struggle to fill the white canvas, at least in part, with something new and unique. That characteristic feeling that resonates in every work and gives the entire painterly oeuvre of an artist its unmistakable character. As soon as an artist succeeds in freeing himself from the shackles of art-historical traditions and is confident enough to dare to create something that is completely his own, the result is usually of a very special quality. In this sense, Konrad Klapheck is an outstanding artist. The objects he placed on the canvas in a surreal, hyper-representational manner resemble modern symbols due to their great associative density and have a completely unmistakable character and incomparable modernity, both in terms of form and content. From the 1950s onwards, Klapheck brought his very own "sound" to the canvas in a perfectionistic fine painting style. He remained true to figuration in an environment dominated by gestural abstraction and, in the combination of painted subject matter, alienating elements, and human-emotional titles, preserved personal and existential worlds ranging from childhood memories to abstract ideas of the afterlife. Konrad Klapheck - painterly perfection with a cool and casual aura Konrad Klapheck not only gave a soul to his objects, but also to his painting, turning them into fascinating complex depictions of abstract thought processes and emotional worlds. His "machine paintings" made Klapheck, who did largely without direct depictions of people, a painter of humanity. The unique aura his paintings emanate must be experienced both visually and emotionally. In their technical perfection, entirely free from traces of any manual style, Klapheck's paintings seem to have fallen from the sky. Based on meticulously thought-out preparatory drawings, they give no hint of their laborious, extremely meticulous creative process, but rather fascinate us to this day with their unique and cool aura. [JS]
Konrad Klapheck, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, November 11 - December 11, 1966, cat. no. 146 (with the label on the rear of the frame). Konrad Klapheck, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, September 14 - November 3, 1974 (with the label on the rear of the frame), Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, Brüssel, November 14, 1974 - January 5, 1975, Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf February 15 - March 31, 1975, cat. no. 49. Konrad Klapheck. Retrospektive 1955-1985, Hamburger Kunsthalle, October 4 - November 24, 1985, Kunsthalle Tübingen, September 4 - February 9, 1986, Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich, February 21 - April 13, 1986, Munich 1985, p. 82, cat. no. 25 (illu. on p. 83). Konrad Klapheck, David Zwirner, New York, November 8 - December 22, 2007 (with the shipping label on the rear of the frame)
Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne. Private collection Southern Germany (acquired from the above around 1970, ever since family-owned)
Master of "hyper-figuration" - Fascinating symbols of human existence Through monumentalization, cropping, isolation and recombination, Klapheck alienates these mute helpers in our everyday lives and stages them as isolated protagonists, removed from all mundanity. With his real-surreal pictorial worlds, Klapheck partly anticipated Photorealism and Pop Art. At the same time, he also transcended them. Unlike pop art objects, Klapheck's objects are not reduced to their pure object character, their serial industrial series nature, instead Klapheck creates unmistakable character objects that allow for a wide panorama of associations and emotions and thus become symbols of our human existence. Klapheck himself has described the humanity of the objects and machines he placed on the canvas in a "hyper-representational" manner as follows: "[..] Of course, I was sometimes asked, especially by older people, by my mother's friends or my mother-in-law: 'Yes, you have such lovely children, don't you want to paint them? And why do you exclude people?' And back then I always thought: 'But people are at the center of my work, they are the subject! But I use the instruments that people use. Man has been creating self-portraits since the Stone Age, from the first stone wedge to the computer of today. Man is reflected in the everyday objects he has created." (K. Klapheck, 2002, quoted from: Klapheck. Bilder und Texte, Munich 2013, p. 114). Nothing escapes the dissecting view Klapheck has on his everyday environment, and he decided to "build an entire system out of the machine themes in order to tell [his] biography through them." (K. Klapheck, quoted from: Mensch und Maschinen. Bilder von Konrad Klapheck, Bonn 2006, p. 85). Klapheck's suggestive titles range from pictures of machines, some of which are associated with politics and authorities, such as "Der Chef" (Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf), "Der Diktator" (Museum Ludwig, Cologne) or "Der Krieg" (Kunstsammlungen Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf), over household appliances with feminine and maternal associations such as "Die Supermutter" or "Der Hausdrache", to the bicycles, motorcycles and roller skates in which Klapheck renders memories of his own youth and that of his children. "The Technique of Conquest" - a symbol of the desperate search for love and emotional fulfillment This present early painting with the evocative title "Die Technik der Eroberung" (The Technique of Conquest) is one of the rare works in which Klapheck explores the themes of love and eroticism in a cool "hyper-representational" manner, as it is also the case in the painting "Alphabet der Leidenschaft" (Alphabet of Passion) from 1961, which featured in the exhibition "Surrealism Beyond Borders" at Tate Modern, London, in 2022. In the "Die Technik der Eroberung", Klapheck masterfully succeeds in creating a surreal spatial confusion as a symbol of a sensual-erotic quest. In formal terms, Klapheck says he received important inspiration for this work from the imagery of contemporary animated films such as "Tom and Jerry": "There are lovely scenes in which the mouse has to climb up and get into a door lock in order to operate the mechanism with his teeth, and the door pops open spectacularly." ( quoted from: Konrad Klapheck, exh. cat. Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam 1974, p.118). In the richly associative imagery of lock and key, Klapheck confronts us with the desperate search for love and emotional fulfillment, with the existential striving to overcome one's own loneliness in a fulfilling partnership. Klapheck's paintings - with the exception of his late figurative works - are always without people, yet they touch us in a very direct way; they are - despite their cool precision - the essence of human thought and feeling. In "Die Technik der Eroberung", Klapheck has achieved the seemingly impossible: Completely devoid of people, he stages an erotically charged game of confusion that - after successfully overcoming numerous obstacles - carries the hope of fulfillment.
Condition report on request katalogisierung@kettererkunst.de
Lot Details
Oil on canvas. Signed and dated on the reverse. Titled on the stretcher. 90 x 70 cm.
• "Die Technik der Eroberung" (The Technique of Conquest) - a masterly staged surreal play of spatial confusion as a symbol of a sensual-erotic quest. • He tells a story of seduction in subtle colors with surprising accents in green and red. • Klapheck is regarded as both the inventor and master of the "machine image", which he sees as a mirror of human existence. • Klapheck's oeuvre, consisting exclusively of character objects, has anticipated Pop Art and Photorealism since the 1950s. • Shown in several important Klapheck exhibitions since 1966, among others, at the Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam/Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1974/75) and the Kunsthalle Hamburg/Kunsthalle Tübingen (1985/86). • Part of a private collection in Southern Germany for over 50 years. The work is registered in the artist's archive under number 146. LITERATURE: Josè Pierre, Konrad Klapheck, Colgne 1970, no. 146. Konrad Klapheck and the unique "sound" of his pictures Works of art are not only products but also mirrors of human imagination. They are characters that not only reveal the artist's pictorial language and characteristic sense of form and color but also provide insight into the spiritual and emotional world of their creators. In an interview, the Hamburg painter Daniel Richter once emphasized how underestimated and difficult it is for a painter to find his own "sound". It is about this unmistakably individual character, the intrinsic value of form and content gained from the same painterly means of color and canvas. The struggle to fill the white canvas, at least in part, with something new and unique. That characteristic feeling that resonates in every work and gives the entire painterly oeuvre of an artist its unmistakable character. As soon as an artist succeeds in freeing himself from the shackles of art-historical traditions and is confident enough to dare to create something that is completely his own, the result is usually of a very special quality. In this sense, Konrad Klapheck is an outstanding artist. The objects he placed on the canvas in a surreal, hyper-representational manner resemble modern symbols due to their great associative density and have a completely unmistakable character and incomparable modernity, both in terms of form and content. From the 1950s onwards, Klapheck brought his very own "sound" to the canvas in a perfectionistic fine painting style. He remained true to figuration in an environment dominated by gestural abstraction and, in the combination of painted subject matter, alienating elements, and human-emotional titles, preserved personal and existential worlds ranging from childhood memories to abstract ideas of the afterlife. Konrad Klapheck and the unique "sound" of his pictures Works of art are not only products but also mirrors of human imagination. They are characters that not only reveal the artist's pictorial language and characteristic sense of form and color but also provide insight into the spiritual and emotional world of their creators. In an interview, the Hamburg painter Daniel Richter once emphasized how underestimated and difficult it is for a painter to find his own "sound". It is about this unmistakably individual character, the intrinsic value of form and content gained from the same painterly means of color and canvas. The struggle to fill the white canvas, at least in part, with something new and unique. That characteristic feeling that resonates in every work and gives the entire painterly oeuvre of an artist its unmistakable character. As soon as an artist succeeds in freeing himself from the shackles of art-historical traditions and is confident enough to dare to create something that is completely his own, the result is usually of a very special quality. In this sense, Konrad Klapheck is an outstanding artist. The objects he placed on the canvas in a surreal, hyper-representational manner resemble modern symbols due to their great associative density and have a completely unmistakable character and incomparable modernity, both in terms of form and content. From the 1950s onwards, Klapheck brought his very own "sound" to the canvas in a perfectionistic fine painting style. He remained true to figuration in an environment dominated by gestural abstraction and, in the combination of painted subject matter, alienating elements, and human-emotional titles, preserved personal and existential worlds ranging from childhood memories to abstract ideas of the afterlife. Konrad Klapheck - painterly perfection with a cool and casual aura Konrad Klapheck not only gave a soul to his objects, but also to his painting, turning them into fascinating complex depictions of abstract thought processes and emotional worlds. His "machine paintings" made Klapheck, who did largely without direct depictions of people, a painter of humanity. The unique aura his paintings emanate must be experienced both visually and emotionally. In their technical perfection, entirely free from traces of any manual style, Klapheck's paintings seem to have fallen from the sky. Based on meticulously thought-out preparatory drawings, they give no hint of their laborious, extremely meticulous creative process, but rather fascinate us to this day with their unique and cool aura. [JS]
Konrad Klapheck, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, November 11 - December 11, 1966, cat. no. 146 (with the label on the rear of the frame). Konrad Klapheck, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, September 14 - November 3, 1974 (with the label on the rear of the frame), Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, Brüssel, November 14, 1974 - January 5, 1975, Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf February 15 - March 31, 1975, cat. no. 49. Konrad Klapheck. Retrospektive 1955-1985, Hamburger Kunsthalle, October 4 - November 24, 1985, Kunsthalle Tübingen, September 4 - February 9, 1986, Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich, February 21 - April 13, 1986, Munich 1985, p. 82, cat. no. 25 (illu. on p. 83). Konrad Klapheck, David Zwirner, New York, November 8 - December 22, 2007 (with the shipping label on the rear of the frame)
Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne. Private collection Southern Germany (acquired from the above around 1970, ever since family-owned)
Master of "hyper-figuration" - Fascinating symbols of human existence Through monumentalization, cropping, isolation and recombination, Klapheck alienates these mute helpers in our everyday lives and stages them as isolated protagonists, removed from all mundanity. With his real-surreal pictorial worlds, Klapheck partly anticipated Photorealism and Pop Art. At the same time, he also transcended them. Unlike pop art objects, Klapheck's objects are not reduced to their pure object character, their serial industrial series nature, instead Klapheck creates unmistakable character objects that allow for a wide panorama of associations and emotions and thus become symbols of our human existence. Klapheck himself has described the humanity of the objects and machines he placed on the canvas in a "hyper-representational" manner as follows: "[..] Of course, I was sometimes asked, especially by older people, by my mother's friends or my mother-in-law: 'Yes, you have such lovely children, don't you want to paint them? And why do you exclude people?' And back then I always thought: 'But people are at the center of my work, they are the subject! But I use the instruments that people use. Man has been creating self-portraits since the Stone Age, from the first stone wedge to the computer of today. Man is reflected in the everyday objects he has created." (K. Klapheck, 2002, quoted from: Klapheck. Bilder und Texte, Munich 2013, p. 114). Nothing escapes the dissecting view Klapheck has on his everyday environment, and he decided to "build an entire system out of the machine themes in order to tell [his] biography through them." (K. Klapheck, quoted from: Mensch und Maschinen. Bilder von Konrad Klapheck, Bonn 2006, p. 85). Klapheck's suggestive titles range from pictures of machines, some of which are associated with politics and authorities, such as "Der Chef" (Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf), "Der Diktator" (Museum Ludwig, Cologne) or "Der Krieg" (Kunstsammlungen Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf), over household appliances with feminine and maternal associations such as "Die Supermutter" or "Der Hausdrache", to the bicycles, motorcycles and roller skates in which Klapheck renders memories of his own youth and that of his children. "The Technique of Conquest" - a symbol of the desperate search for love and emotional fulfillment This present early painting with the evocative title "Die Technik der Eroberung" (The Technique of Conquest) is one of the rare works in which Klapheck explores the themes of love and eroticism in a cool "hyper-representational" manner, as it is also the case in the painting "Alphabet der Leidenschaft" (Alphabet of Passion) from 1961, which featured in the exhibition "Surrealism Beyond Borders" at Tate Modern, London, in 2022. In the "Die Technik der Eroberung", Klapheck masterfully succeeds in creating a surreal spatial confusion as a symbol of a sensual-erotic quest. In formal terms, Klapheck says he received important inspiration for this work from the imagery of contemporary animated films such as "Tom and Jerry": "There are lovely scenes in which the mouse has to climb up and get into a door lock in order to operate the mechanism with his teeth, and the door pops open spectacularly." ( quoted from: Konrad Klapheck, exh. cat. Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam 1974, p.118). In the richly associative imagery of lock and key, Klapheck confronts us with the desperate search for love and emotional fulfillment, with the existential striving to overcome one's own loneliness in a fulfilling partnership. Klapheck's paintings - with the exception of his late figurative works - are always without people, yet they touch us in a very direct way; they are - despite their cool precision - the essence of human thought and feeling. In "Die Technik der Eroberung", Klapheck has achieved the seemingly impossible: Completely devoid of people, he stages an erotically charged game of confusion that - after successfully overcoming numerous obstacles - carries the hope of fulfillment.
Condition report on request katalogisierung@kettererkunst.de
Konrad Klapheck 
