Konrad Klapheck - Master of the Machine Picture
Konrad Klapheck was the inventor and undisputed master of the machine painting. In 1955, he created his first typewriter painting and thus identified the decisive the pivotal starting point for his oeuvre, which henceforth saw sewing machines, irons, kettles, telephones, roller skates and other objects of domestic life at its center. Through monumentalization, cropping, isolation, and recombination, Klapheck alienated these silent everyday helpers and staged them as isolated protagonists, removed from all prosaicness. With his real-surreal pictorial worlds, Klapheck to some extent anticipated and even overcame Photorealism and Pop Art at the same time.

Klapheck's Machine Paintings - "Super-Concreteness" as a Mirror of Human Existence
It is this particular sharpness of detail and objectivity of representation in combination with alienated elements and often emotionalized titles that makes the viewer's sensation oscillate between closeness and distance. Klapheck's objects, unlike the objects of Pop Art, are not reduced to their pure object character, their industrial and serial nature, instead Klapheck created unmistakable ‘object characters’ that trigger a wide range of associations and emotions and thus become symbols of our human existence. Klapheck himself once described the ‘humanness’ of his objects and machines rendered on the canvas in "super-concreteness" as follows: "[..] of course I [have] sometimes been asked, especially by older people, by my mother's friends or my mother-in-law: 'Well, you have these wonderful children, why don't you paint them? And why do you exclude the human being?' And that always makes me think: But the human being is at the core of my work, it is the subject! But I use the instruments that man uses. Since the Stone Age, man has created self-portraits, from the first stone wedge to the computer of today. After all, man is reflected in the objects he creates." (K. Klapheck, 2002, quoted from: Klapheck. Bilder und Texte, Munich 2013, p. 114). Nothing escapes Klapheck's dissecting gaze on his everyday environment, and he decides to "build an entire system out of the machine themes to tell [his] biography through them." (K. Klapheck, quoted from: Mensch und Maschine. Bilder von Konrad Klapheck, Bonn 2006, p. 85). Klapheck's increasingly interpretive titles point the way from machine pictures evoking political-authoritarian associations such as "Der Chef" (Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf), "Der Diktator" (Museum Ludwig, Cologne) or "Der Krieg" (Kunstsammlungen Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf) to pictures of household appliances from female-maternal associative realms like "Die Supermutter" or "Der Hausdrache", eventually making bicycles, motorcycles and roller skates in which Klapheck artistically records memories of his own youth and that of his children.

Klapheck's "Lamento" - A Modern Masterpiece Between Reality and Fiction
What is special about the present painting is its trompe-l'œil quality, which elevates Klapheck's super-concreteness to a fascinating optical illusion. In this work it is not one of Klapheck's typewriters hanging on the wall, or his irons or kettles, all of which are clearly recognizable as art by the way they are mounted, but a fire extinguisher box with a large black valve, a long red hose and a nozzle painted with a maximum degree of perfection. In reality, too, a fire extinguisher box is attached to the wall, which means that in "Lamento" Klapheck succeeded in creating a particularly subtle play along the border between reality and fiction. Paintings that merely suggest reality, that pretend to be reality through the painterly fiction of three-dimensionality have been created since Renaissance, for example in the form of fictitious window views or objects on walls. Klapheck meticulously worked out the three-dimensional illusion deceptively real; the spatial presence evoked by the shadow that case and hose cast on the bright yellow back wall of the extinguisher box is compelling. The case’s red frame also maximizes the haptic presence of the object depicted. It is the sheer magnitude of the depiction, the object exalted to a surreal over-sized format, that creates a perfect fiction and allows the object to be recognized as art. Even though Klapheck's subtle manner of painting refuses any visible brushwork and presents us the object in a unique way that is at the same time close and distant, similar to an object of scientific research in a lab that is preserved behind glass. In "Lamento", however, Klapheck took his super-representational painting method to the extreme in the form of an optical illusion. Here he took the thin line between reality and fiction to the extreme, and in the end it is precisely Klapheck's super-concreteness, which is sharper, more dissecting and more precise than any reality, that reveals the optical illusion as a fascinating painterly artifice, in addition to the alienating over-sized representation of the object.

Klapheck's "Lamento" - Super-Concrete Allegory of Life
The artist's mother died in 1986, and Konrad Klapheck made our fiery red "Lamento" painting, a powerful optical outcry. Klapheck's mother had probably been the most formative person in his life, understanding and controlling, loving and confining at the same time. The household appliances with associative powers from female-maternal realms of the previous years - such as "Die Supermutter" and "Hausdrache" were dedicated to her. She was widowed, his father had already died in 1939 and Konrad was her only son. The wound up hose squeezed into the box is also a symbol of adaptation for Klapheck - as is also the case in his work "Repression" from 1973. In a fascinating manner, Klapheck's painting is clear and mysterious at the same time; it captivates through the factual-cool objectivity of the representation in combination with a subjective-emotional associative density, which the artist usually creates by choosing emotionally charged titles for his character objects. In just one word, "Lamento" describes the lamenting of the often painful challenges life has in store, the small stumbling blocks and the agonizing, great trials of life and death. They make up our human existence, they are a vital part of it, and yet all too often upset us, make us stand still in lament or in pain, paralyze us in lament and lead us astray. The flexuous red hose in the narrow confines of the box becomes not only a symbol of adaptation but also a symbol of the emotional complexity of our human existence. It is displayed in the glass box like an umbilical cord that pumps blood and oxygen, while the clear confines of the box show its limits. The blazing red painting "Lamento" is one of the most outstanding examples of Klapheck's unique ability to combine technically perfected still life painting with a factual-cool alienation of reality, which, owing to its high associative density, triggers a highly complex, subjective-emotional sensation. In a highly condensed manner, Klapheck's "Lamento" confronts us with existential questions and initiates complex reflections on meaning, significance and limits of our existence.
Konrad Klapheck has ultimately taken René Magritte's famous phrase "Ceci n'est pas un pipe" to an artistic extreme with his cool representational creations characterized by a high associative density. [JS]