Konrad Klapheck

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Konrad Klapheck portrayed by Lothar Wolleh

Konrad Klapheck (born February 10, 1935 in Düsseldorf ) is a German graphic designer, painter, artist and (emeritus) art professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy . Today it is considered a classic of the post-war avant-garde.

Life

Konrad Peter Cornelius Klapheck was born on February 10, 1935 as the only child of the professors of art history , Richard Klapheck and Anna Klapheck in Düsseldorf . His father, who died four years after Konrad's birth, worked at the Düsseldorf Art Academy until his dismissal by the Nazis in 1934, where Konrad's mother Anna (née Strümpell) also held a chair in art history from 1952 to 1966 after the end of the Second World War . During the war Anna Klapheck fled with Konrad to her grandparents in Leipzig, where he had to watch how the grandparents' villa was destroyed by a bomb attack and went up in flames. The eight-year-old experienced this moment as a captivating spectacle.

After the war ended, Anna and Konrad moved back to Düsseldorf in 1945. There he attended the Humboldt Gymnasium . In 1954 he passed his school leaving certificate and enrolled at the Düsseldorf Art Academy , where he became a student of Bruno Goller . With strong interest in Surrealism, he attended at this time in this year Paris living Max Ernst . His first typewriter picture ( Typewriter , 1955) was very popular with Goller, who encouraged Klapheck to pursue object painting. In 1958 Klapheck finished his studies and celebrated his first major success with painting. He sold six paintings to George Staempfli, who a year later exhibited them in his gallery in New York alongside works by Yves Klein , Jesús Rafael Soto and Lucio Fontana .

In 1960 Klapheck married Lilo Lang, whom he had known since he was 16, visited the painter Richard Oelze in Worpswede and acquired one of his works, which laid the foundation for a small collection by the artist. In the same year he was awarded the Great Art Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. He then rejected all awards. In 1961 Klapheck came into contact with the Paris surrealist group around André Breton . The following year he met the Belgian painter René Magritte at one of Magritte's exhibitions. At another meeting of the two, Klapheck presented a selection of his work to Magritte. Magritte criticized the background of the works he had brought with them - little stone backgrounds that Magritte found too "picturesque". Klapheck's daughter Elisa Klapheck was born in the same year . Three years later, the Klapheck couple had their second child, David. In 1965 Klapheck exhibited for the first time in a solo exhibition in Paris, where in 1956 his application for admission to the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris had been rejected. The topicality of his works was confirmed in 1970 by the new style of hyperrealism .

In 1979 interest in new styles such as "wild painting" pushed Klapheck's way of painting temporarily into the background. Between 1997 and 2002 he took over a professorship for free painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. From 1992 to 2002 Klapheck portrayed colleagues, friends and celebrities from the international art scene. He paints women and men, black and white, full-length and endowed with unusual attributes. A selection was published in book form in 2002 by Verlag Schirmer Mosel, Munich.

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Klapheck's style of painting combines features of Neorealism , Surrealism and Pop Art (even before it appeared as such) to create a style of his own, which he still adheres to today. Since the 1950s he has been painting precisely, figuratively, often in large format and apparently realistic technical devices, machines, apparatus and everyday objects, but strangely alienated and newly composed so that they become demons, icons or monuments. These include typewriters, sewing machines, taps and showers, telephones, irons, shoe trees and shoes, keys, saws, car tires, bicycle clamps and clocks. This arrangement corresponds to the order in which the subjects appeared in Klapheck's works. The subjects from the world of machines, devices and tools earned the artist the reputation of a “machine painter”.

The ironic or playful titles of the paintings such as The charming Chaotin , The Difficult Wife , The Super Mother , The Sex Bomb and Her Companion , The Violence of Things , In the Age of Violence , The Oracle or The Vassals from 1986, which are often painted, are also essential Make objects performers and surrealist characters.

Exhibitions (selection)

literature

  • Eckhart Gillen (Ed.): Pictures of Germany. Art from a divided country. Catalog for the exhibition of the 47th Berliner Festwochen in the Martin-Gropius-Bau, September 7, 1997 to January 11, 1998, DuMont, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-7701-4173-3 . (Catalog edition)
  • Konrad Klapheck. Retrospective 1955–1985. Prestel, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-7913-0729-0 .
  • Konrad Klapheck exhibition catalog Kestner Society, Hanover 1966
  • Konrad Klapheck. Exhibition catalog. Cologne 1970.
  • A. Schwarz: Konrad Klapheck. Gabrius. Milan 2002.
  • Ferdinand Ullrich, Hans-Jürgen Schwalm (Ed.): People and machines. Pictures by Konrad Klapheck. Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen 2006, ISBN 3-929040-97-2 .
  • Konrad Klapheck: Portrait Drawings 1992–2002. Munich 2002.
  • Konrad Klapheck. Hans Ulrich Obrist (The Conversation Series 3). Photographs: Hans-Peter Feldmann. König, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-86560-035-2 .
  • Kristine Bell (Ed.): Konrad Klapheck: Paintings from 1955 - 1988 . Steidl, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-86521-630-4 .

Web links

Commons : Konrad Klapheck  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

The following web links show examples of some of his works.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Konrad Klapheck among the artists and curators at "kunstaspekte"
  2. ↑ Konrad Peter Cornelius Klapheck under the heading "Painting" at art DIRECTORY
  3. ^ Konrad Klapheck among the visual artists in "Künstlerleben in Düsseldorf" from the Düsseldorf Cultural Office
  4. ↑ Oliver Tepel: The siblings of the machines . Exhibition report from July 4, 2013 in the portal freitag.de , accessed on July 6, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Klapheck, Konrad
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Klapheck, Konrad Peter Cornelius (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, artist and art professor
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf