Detail

“Why do I paint these pictures?” German painter Konrad Klapheck asked and answered his own question by giving a biographical résumé: “My machine paintings enabled me to find the past without looking for it and to deal with the problems of the present. Underneath each successful painting there lay another painting which, though it could only be guessed at, gave meaning to what occurred on the surface.” As early as 1955, the twenty-year old student at the Academy of Fine Arts, Düsseldorf, painted his first hyper-realistic typewriter picture. With this painting he took a stand against the expressive and gestural schools of painting dominating the art scene at that time. As Klapheck himself said, he wanted to “set something hard and precise against the vague and blurry.” With his first machine portrait the painter discovered a subject matter that would continue to fascinate him throughout his career. Klapheck went on to develop a whole system of technical objects: sewing machines, fire extinguishers, flat-irons and electric shavers all become protagonists that are grouped in different families. All the paintings bear allusive titles in which certain psychological behaviours – fears, desires, risks, weaknesses – find expression and in which both the artist’s current state of mind and his memories are reflected. "Triumph of Destruction" shows a giant bulldozer belonging to the family of motor vehicles and building machinery. These machines stand for motion and change but also, as here, for destruction. While Klapheck’s perfect painting technique lends his machines a noble and mysterious distance, their fetishist character betrays an affinity both with the Neue Sachlichkeit and Magical Realism.