Konrad Klapheck

Simultaneously alienating and ‘classical’, he is variously seen as an avant-garde artist and scion of the Neue Sachlichkeit, a late surrealist or a forerunner of pop art. He has been continually assigned a new position, depending on the art critic at that moment. However, Klapheck’s unique oeuvre is hard to capture in a particular movement. Not least because after forty years of painting still lifes of machines, he seemingly all of a sudden started to orchestrate his paintings around the human figure, a late change of style that few artists would dare to attempt and survive. But Klapheck did. In doing so, he is turning his own motif around as it were: men and women appear as almost abstracted, compartmentalised and mechanical bodies. Totem figures in a paradoxical, restrictive world full of colour.

This Spätstil sufficed initially as something valuable and necessary for the artist himself, but it makes much clear about the fundamentals of his total oeuvre. For this reason, the route for visitors to the exhibition is back to front.