Klapheck, Konrad: Devotion (1959)

Konrad Klapheck, student and later professor at the Art Academy, Düsseldorf, has created object paintings with careful precision since 1950. Over the years, he depicted a vast array of household utensils and business machines. During his travels to Paris, he met André Breton and the Surrealists, but he was also impressed by the encounter with Max Ernst in 1954. Devotion shows an object reminding a typewriter at a 45 degree angle. The minimized still life is a mixture of the elements of Neo-realism, Surrealism and Pop art, in the centre of which, instead of a composition of objects typical of the traditional still lifes, there is the representation of only one demonized and monumental object. Klapheck grouped his artistic ideas into an abstract and a physical world. The typewriter is the symbol of the order, while the sewing machine is the equivalent of the physical world. Both objects have been painted in around forty versions over the years. The artist claimed that he was inspired by “desire and a taste for precision” in portraying his objects. Surrealist titles are also characteristic of his paintings made of other everyday objects – water taps, showers, phones, irons, shoe racks, keys, saws, car wheels, bicycle locks and watches.