Konrad Klapheck – Perfection of a Bizarr Pictorial World
An early random encounter with the imagery of Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst or Man Ray, their ironic treatment of everyday objects, and as a student of Bruno Goller and his timeless ciphers in abstract imagery, as well as the trivial iconography of pop art, best describes the sources of inspiration that Konrad Klapheck needed to conceive a bizarre world between the real and the surreal equipped with objects such as typewriters, bulldozers, water hoses, keyholes or, as is the case here, the “Sprint” motorcycle in a characteristic odd perspectives.

It is the perspective that stands in strange contrast to a reality that we think we know, but which evokes our unsettling look. Nevertheless, it makes it difficult for us overcome our proven and tested viewing pattern s. This motorcycle, which was composed from numerous templates, appears to be non-functional: the supporting frame is missing, however, it appears to have been taken into account, as the scores of construction lines suggest. “So far I had only trusted my feelings in deciding whether the dimensions of the object or the structure of the room were right or not,” says Klapheck about the development of his drawings. “Over time, I discovered rules that I used to develop a system. I always started by drawing the vertical and horizontal center lines on the canvas in red pencil, thus obtaining a coordinate plane that I could more rely on than on the picture’s often bent outer edges when applying the triangle square. Then there were several things I had to avoid: no line should run through the crossing point, and no intersection of two charcoal lines was allowed to fall on the red pencil cross. All distances between the intersections on the cross had to differ in length; none, not even as the sum of two distances, could be repeated. I now worked with the folding yardstick, covering the drawings with numbers, and when the foreshortening issues of perspective came on top, the pocket calculator was my main instrument. And what’s the point of all this? I wanted to achieve the greatest possible tension, the greatest possible asymmetry, and while consciously avoiding repetitions, I thought of twelve-tone music and its prohibition of repeating a tone in a twelve-tone row." (Konrad Klapheck, Über meine zeichnungen, Munich 1996, p. 26 )

Klapheck's "Die Jagd nach dem Glück" – Perfection and Construction
Klapheck's background information is remarkable and at the same time exaggerated; last but not least, he draws on a broad art-historical education, for example on the idea of the camera obscura from Dürer's time, or perhaps his encounters with Surrealism seduced him to these provocative intricacies. The result is a series of everyday objects for which Klapheck uses complex construction drawings to shift them from this world into a surreal world, mixing the real with the fantastic full of relish, “constructively” disregarding the proportions and giving the whole thing a poetic title: “Die Jagd nach dem Glück“ (Chasing Fortune)

“A fellow artist remarked,” said Klapheck in 1982, “that he liked the preliminary drawings better than the finished pictures; they were fresher and more lively than the perfect final products. In response to my irritated answer, he said, “Then do the preliminary drawing on paper and transfer it to canvas, so you have both drawing and picture.” (Klappheck, Über meine Zeichnungen, p. 26)
The title “Chasing Fortune” may now be taken literally, as this is the very first time that, with a tad of commitment and fortune, both drawing and pictures, on top of that both on canvas, can be acquired! Nevertheless , this larger-than-life, monumental motorcycle is highly incomplete. What we see is not a roadworthy two-wheeler, but rather the abstract idea of a motorcycle, formally clarified through the artist's endless manipulations, for which he artist created a proposal, so to speak. “I decided to build a whole system out of the machine themes and tell my biography through them. Didn't I hesitate about becoming a writer or a painter after I had finished school? I figured I could be both. What mattered was precision, you can’t paint a blurred machine, what was important was the accuracy of the composition, the balance of tension and harmony, and, as far as the color was concerned, the right measure of simplicity and elegance”, said Konrad Klapheck. (Konrad Klappheck, Warum ich male, Munich 1996, p. 23). In terms of appearance, Klapheck's idea corresponds to models from the early 1950s, such as the Italian brand “Montesa”. A brand named “Sprint” is not known and is merely used as an additional name for historical motorcycle manufacturers, a Klapheck brand “Sprint” is immortalized here as a brand in the constructive process of its artistic production. At the same time, the “Sprint” motorcycle has become an idol of its existence thanks to its size, abstraction and perfection of paint application. “My pictures,” as Konrad Klapheck himself wrote, should evoke the impression “as if they were not made by a human hand.” And in addition to this remarkable aspect of the artist's work, his surrealistic view of the motif of his desire becomes the central motif of his art: Klapheck tells stories, his special interpretation of stories behind everyday objects as bearer of stories. “For years I had erased everything that revealed the work process. I tried to give my pictures the appearance of not being made by man, as if they had fallen from the sky. Should I really reveal the witnesses of my struggle with their sweaty smell of desperate searching and groping? Should I really show the long path that leads from the first idea to the finished work and is paved with disappointments? But didn't these rugged sheets also tell of the joy of finding the right line in the right place and didn't they also encourage more inexperienced artists enforce inspiration?" (Konrad Klapheck, Über meine Zeichnungen, pp. 25/26)

Klapheck – Master of a Surreal Reality
Klapheck's machines do not remain in pure figuration, do not imitate models, do not represent the real machine, but rather transform themselves into the abstract idea of the respective real object. With his creations characterized by a highly associative density, Konrad Klapheck ultimately took René Magritte's famous sentence "Ceci n'est pas un pipe" to an artistic extreme and addressed the difference between reality and its pictorial representation. However, with the heading "Sprint" he goes one step further, because the written word replaces the actual quality of speed that was lost through the artist's alienation strategies: the word "sprint" can trigger the idea of freedom of a fast motorbike ride only in our imagination. (MvL)