Konrad Klapheck 1935 – 2023

It is with great sadness that we remember the painter Konrad Klapheck, who passed away on Sunday, July 30, 2023, at the age of 88. We express our deepest sympathy to his relatives.

The painter Konrad Klapheck, born in Düsseldorf in 1935, succeeds in his “liberation to his own” at the age of just twenty with the depiction of a typewriter – from then on he builds a system of machine themes, he becomes a “machine painter”. Thereby the technical-geometric forms of the machine show attributes and qualities of human characteristics and body language.
No one else could have linked 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 unique clear and precise pictorial language can be found just as much in the next period of his work, which he establishes in 1997: the humanization of objects is transformed into the objectification of human figures. From then on, he paints nudes that bear unmistakably technical features: object and human body become interchangeable.
Konrad Klapheck is one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century and is accredited worldwide.