Konrad Klapheck

The things, the machines that Konrad Klapheck (born in 1935) paints are not utilitarian devices; they have lost any practical use, are non-functional and have been frozen in their painterly brilliance into enigmatic beings that appear familiar, and yet remain absent and strange. “Using my machine pictures, I was able, without having to look, to rediscover the past, and to deal with the problems of living in the present. Underneath every successful picture lay another, one that could just be ascertained, that gave meaning to that which occurred on the surface …” At the end of the 1990s, the human form entered the work of Klapheck. These dreamy-nightmares vitalised his world of artefacts, the surreal illustration “lives” on in his new pictures: the persons displayed are again frozen in their cold painterly perfection into enigmatic beings.