Konrad Klapheck

The work

The Impatience of the Sphinx
2004
56 x 71.2 cm
Lithography

The Sphinx referred to in the title has taken the form of a strange piercing machine, similar to that of a sewing machine. It is depicted in profile with a cold, precise, and realistic painting, like an illustration in a catalog of technical equipment or machinery. The impatience of the title may be suggested by the length of the piercing needle and the ominous sense of threat.
The Sphinx was an ancient mythological animal that guarded the entrance to the Greek city of Thebes, demanding the answer to a riddle it posed to travelers before allowing them passage. Those who failed to answer correctly or did not know the answer lost their lives and were devoured.
Klapheck was a painter and graphic artist. The paintings he began exhibiting in the 1950s were depictions of household machinery. His subjects have included typewriters, sewing machines, faucets and showers, telephones, irons, shoes, keys, saws, tires, bicycle bells, and clocks.
“I decided to construct an entire system of mechanical themes to tell my autobiography through them.” In this way, he demonstrated the relationship between machines and human beings, a preoccupation of artists and intellectuals since the late 19th century, a subject of which the machine protagonist of Kafka’s short story, “In the Penal Colony”, from 1919, is highly representative.

The artist

(1935, Düsseldorf, Alemanya – 2023, Düsseldorf)

Klapheck was a painter and graphic artist. The paintings he began exhibiting in the 1950s are depictions of domestic machinery. His subjects have included typewriters, sewing machines, taps and showers, telephones, irons, shoes, nails, saws, tyres, bicycle bells and clocks.
Born to a Jewish family, Klapheck experienced his father’s expulsion from the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he taught and where he would later be one of the six million innocent people murdered in the extermination camps. He died in Auschwitz. The artifacts painted by Klapheck are intended as allegories of instruments in the service of evil, the typewriters with which the Nazi bureaucracy issued death sentences for those condemned to the concentration camps.
The sewing machines refer to the clear separation of social roles between men and women, a separation that was very clear in a society like the Nazi one, relegating women to their role as housewives, more closely linked to sewing machines as indispensable elements within the role of guardians of the home that Nazi ideology had granted them.
In the 1950s, Klapheck studied with her mentor, the surrealist Bruno Goller, and through him came into contact with André Breton. She moved to Paris at the time of the rise of Informalism, but found herself unsettled artistically and returned to her native Düsseldorf.
He was one of the few international artists in the Stämpfli Foundation’s collection who did not pursue a career in Paris.