Nothing escaped Klapheck's dissecting gaze on his everyday environment. Accordingly, his later creative period was increasingly determined by the small protagonists of everyday life, such as cables, chains, plugs, and keys. "Die Rettung” (The Salvation) is a particularly fine example of this focus on things that only at first sight appear trivial. Starting with the household appliances of the 1950s/60s, which mostly bear associations of femininity and motherliness, we find memories of his own youth and that of his children in later works, pictures with bicycles, motorcycles and roller skates. Since the death of his mother (1986) and his wife (1987), ideas of faith and the afterlife have also increasingly found their way into Klapheck's work. After his Jewish wife was killed by a fire in a holiday home, Klapheck painted a red typewriter inscribed in Hebrew letters and named it "Schmerz" (Pain) in 1988. Works entitled "Das Opfer” (The Victim), “Bekenntnis” (Confession, 1989, Hamburger Kunsthalle), "Angst” (Fear) and "Schicksal” (Fate) followed. Three years after the present work was made, Klapheck painted a key chained in a key box, and gave the work the meaningful title "Der verhinderte Apostel” (The Inhibited Apostle, 1992, private collection Southern Germany). Hence, the key with the red wire in form of an infinity loop in our painting, as well as the obvious title "Die Rettung” (The Salvation) suggests associations with the gate to the Kingdom of Heaven. Klapheck, who was not Jewish, was married to a Jewish woman, and it is precisely the concept of the afterlife where Judaism and Christianity strongly differ. In contrast to Christianity, in which Christ as the resurrected Messiah is at the center of the conception of faith, conceptions of the afterlife play a much smaller role in Judaism. The ascension of the saints and the resurrection of the dead, however, is a principle of faith that is firmly rooted in Christianity and has played a central role in Christian art since the Middle Ages. Klapheck, whose parents were both art historians, had been familiar with these rich art-historical traditions since his early childhood. On the one hand, the key in Klapheck's work is a symbol of our hope for resurrection and afterlife; the "Salvation", our spark of hope in the face of the certainty about the finiteness of our earthly existence. On the other hand, as the work was painted in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down, it can also be read as the key to freedom. A variant of interpretation that gains significance through the number "1789" which we find on the preliminary drawing, however, not in the painting. 1789, of course, refers to the French Revolution, a historically significant upheaval on the path to democracy and freedom. Both readings stand side by side on an equal footing, gaining or losing significance depending on the viewer, and can also be supplemented by personal associations. In 1990, a year after the present painting was created, Klapheck described the pain he felt after the death of his wife and his turn from a more worldly to a more existential pictorial content in an interview: "I painted the motorcycle (Chasing Fortune) in 1984, but this red typewriter with the Hebrew letters (Pain [..]) was created after her death. As a non-Jew I took part in my wife’s Jewish funeral. According to the rules, my son David had to say the prayer for the dead at her open grave. The night before, he said to me, "Dad, I can't do that." I answered him, "You have to tell yourself that mama would have expected you to do it. [..] But at the funeral my son said to me, "I'll do it", and he climbed up on the planks on the little mount of sand. It was a spring day, the sun was blinding when he said the prayer, and when he came down, there was an inner radiance in him." (K. Klapheck, 1990, quoted in: Klapheck. Bilder und Texte, ex. cat. Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf 2013). "Die Rettung" is an outstanding example of the complexity of content and artistic quality of Klapheck's painterly œuvre, of Klapheck's characteristic combination of formal clarity and density of content and emotion.
The key in super-concreteness on the canvas right in front of our eyes appears close enough to touch, and triggers an associative game that revolves around personal, socio-political, and even existential questions in us. In "Die Rettung", Klapheck lets the key to the gate of freedom and eternal life dangle in front of our eyes as the central glimmer of hope of our earthly existence; it is surreal-real, seemingly within reach, and yet remains artistic fiction. In the summer of 2023, Konrad Klapheck, the master of super-concreteness, passed away. He left a highly complex artistic oeuvre in which he succeeded in bringing seemingly contradictory things together: A painting of distanced-cool aesthetics that is yet emotionally touching. [JS]