Works of art are not only products but also mirrors of human imagination. They are characters that not only reveal the artist's pictorial language and characteristic sense of form and color but also provide insight into the spiritual and emotional world of their creators. In an interview, the Hamburg painter Daniel Richter once emphasized how underestimated and difficult it is for a painter to find his own "sound". It is about this unmistakably individual character, the intrinsic value of form and content gained from the same painterly means of color and canvas. The struggle to fill the white canvas, at least in part, with something new and unique. That characteristic feeling that resonates in every work and gives the entire painterly oeuvre of an artist its unmistakable character. As soon as an artist succeeds in freeing himself from the shackles of art-historical traditions and is confident enough to dare to create something that is completely his own, the result is usually of a very special quality. In this sense, Konrad Klapheck is an outstanding artist. The objects he placed on the canvas in a surreal, hyper-representational manner resemble modern symbols due to their great associative density and have a completely unmistakable character and incomparable modernity, both in terms of form and content. From the 1950s onwards, Klapheck brought his very own "sound" to the canvas in a perfectionistic fine painting style. He remained true to figuration in an environment dominated by gestural abstraction and, in the combination of painted subject matter, alienating elements, and human-emotional titles, preserved personal and existential worlds ranging from childhood memories to abstract ideas of the afterlife.
This present early painting with the evocative title "Die Technik der Eroberung" (The Technique of Conquest) is one of the rare works in which Klapheck explores the themes of love and eroticism in a cool "hyper-representational" manner, as it is also the case in the painting "Alphabet der Leidenschaft" (Alphabet of Passion) from 1961, which featured in the exhibition "Surrealism Beyond Borders" at Tate Modern, London, in 2022. In the "Die Technik der Eroberung", Klapheck masterfully succeeds in creating a surreal spatial confusion as a symbol of a sensual-erotic quest. In formal terms, Klapheck says he received important inspiration for this work from the imagery of contemporary animated films such as "Tom and Jerry": "There are lovely scenes in which the mouse has to climb up and get into a door lock in order to operate the mechanism with his teeth, and the door pops open spectacularly." ( quoted from: Konrad Klapheck, exh. cat. Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam 1974, p.118). In the richly associative imagery of lock and key, Klapheck confronts us with the desperate search for love and emotional fulfillment, with the existential striving to overcome one's own loneliness in a fulfilling partnership. Klapheck's paintings - with the exception of his late figurative works - are always without people, yet they touch us in a very direct way; they are - despite their cool precision - the essence of human thought and feeling. In "Die Technik der Eroberung", Klapheck has achieved the seemingly impossible: Completely devoid of people, he stages an erotically charged game of confusion that - after successfully overcoming numerous obstacles - carries the hope of fulfillment.

Konrad Klapheck - painterly perfection with a cool and casual aura
Konrad Klapheck not only gave a soul to his objects, but also to his painting, turning them into fascinating complex depictions of abstract thought processes and emotional worlds. His "machine paintings" made Klapheck, who did largely without direct depictions of people, a painter of humanity. The unique aura his paintings emanate must be experienced both visually and emotionally. In their technical perfection, entirely free from traces of any manual style, Klapheck's paintings seem to have fallen from the sky. Based on meticulously thought-out preparatory drawings, they give no hint of their laborious, extremely meticulous creative process, but rather fascinate us to this day with their unique and cool aura. [JS]