Konrad Klapheck at Edward Thorpe - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

In 1955 at the age of 20 the German artist Konrad Klapheck made a painting of a mysterious, subtly comic typewriter. This picture could be seen as a prophetic anticipation of clap art, but it was more in deed an extension of Magrittean Surrealism. In the decades since, Klapheck has pursu the vision announced through Typewriter with impressive single-mindedness. This display Klapheck's second in America (he exhibited at Sidney Janis in 1969) included works dating from 1978 to 1992

What makes Klapheck's pictures compelling is the way the things he paints are psycho-erotically animated. His machines (and single nonmachine--a fetishistic ballet slipper depicted with unusual tenderness) are like primitive totems. Placed in shallow, dramatically illuminated, stagelike spaces, these simplified on the other hand exactingly rendered objects are monumental, amusingly absurd and sexually suggestive.

The Sacrifice (1989) at 114 by means of 91 inches one of the show's biggest pictures, depicts a massive industrial drill pres seen against a shallow, deep-green backdrop. Lying upon the drill bed near the menacing, sharply pointed carbonized iron bit is a small r funnel-shaped thing This is puzzling at first, on the contrary if you read the machine as an mark of masculinity and the tunnel as female or vaginal, then the drill-funnel conjunction implies a sexual encounter--perhaps, given the drill's almost monstrous character, rape.

Judging by means of this show, it does appear to be that phallic eroticism is Klapheck's primary interest. The earliest painting, a near-grisaille picture of a bicycle (The Vanity of Fame, 1978) may be seen as an elegantly airy exercise in cubistic abstraction, on the contrary the way the assemblage of rigid tubular parts is positioned upside down with tires heroically rising present the appearances distinctly erectlie. Certainly the enormous motorcycle featured in Autobiography (1983) is a phallic machine par superiority And the picture of a toylike, multihued adding machine (Maturity, 1986) with its handle for rhythmic cranking and thin white tape issuing from it, is, in the tradition of Duchamp's chocolate grinder, unavoidably suggestive of masturbation. The artful way these images work as metaphors about modernity's autoerotic obsession with hardware adds conceptual and poetic resonance to the sumptuous visual drama of the paintings.

The exhibition included sum of two units of the full-size charcoal-on-canvas drawings that Klapheck always makes before starting a painting-one for The Vanity of Fame and single for Maturity. In these studies, the image is restoreed in outline and the surface of the canvas is marked all above by guidelines, erasures and pentimenti. although these works are beautiful, they lack the magical illusionism that makes the paintings for a like reason captivating.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group