The Berlin gallery Michael Haas today announced the death of the Düsseldorf artist Konrad Klapheck and published the following obituary:
fig. above: Konrad Klapheck, The Conspiracy, 1967, oil on canvas, 109 x 80 cm. Installation view in the exhibition “Life in Pictures. A Portrait of Seeing for Rudolf Zwirner”, PalaisPopulaire, 2023
It is with great sadness that we remember the painter Konrad Klapheck, who passed away on Sunday, 30 July 2023, at the age of 88. We extend our deepest sympathy to his relatives.
The painter Konrad Klapheck, born in Düsseldorf in 1935, succeeded in his “liberation to his own” at the age of just twenty with the depiction of a typewriter – from then on he built a system of machine themes, he became a “machine painter”. In the process, the technical-geometric forms of the machine show attributes and qualities of human characteristics and body language.
No one else could have succeeded in linking typewriters and calculating machines with such an unambiguously masculine expression and sewing machines with such an unambiguously feminine appearance in the last stages of Surrealism. His unmistakably clear and precise pictorial language can be found in the same way in the next period of his work, which he established in 1997: the humanisation of objects is transformed into the objectification of human figures. From then on he painted nudes with unmistakably technical features: object and human body became interchangeable.
Konrad Klapheck is one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century and is recognised worldwide.
Please set the text from the Galerie Michael Haas | Niebuhrstr. 5 | 10629 Berlin
