Konrad Klapheck

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This monograph brings together an astonishing group of paintings that span the course of German painter Konrad Klapheck's six-decade-long career--from his painterly investigations of technological machines and everyday objects such as typewriters, sewing machines, and ventilators to his more recent figurative work. Klapheck's early paintings employ subtle anthropomorphization and are charged with psychological, social, and political meaning. A telephone, for example, takes on a playful, eroticized quality in one canvas, while a typewriter becomes a menacing object evocative of brute power in another. An artist's artist, Klapheck has never painted according to fashions dictated by the art world; he is a painter guided by his own obsessions. However, in their surprising combination of deadpan depiction and evocative playfulness, Klapheck's canvases forge an important link in twentieth-century art, melding elements from Surrealism and Pop art with a singular painterly sensibility.