Der Harem (Schuhspanner) [The Harem (Shoe Trees]]

Konrad Klapheck’s work focused on everyday objects and machines, often monumentalized, decontextualized, and suggestively anthropomorphized. His imagery reflected the centrality of technology and consumerism to the post-World War II “economic miracle” in his native West Germany. Klapheck’s emphasis on the evocative powers of common objects also resonated with the Surrealist interest in finding new meanings in the banal, and he exhibited with the Paris-based group throughout the 1960s. While rendering objects precisely, Klapheck sought to encode in them “the most hidden wishes and desires” through symbolism or the use of humorous or psychologically weighted titles.

Typewriters and sewing machines became his most frequent subjects, or “characters,” representing for the artist the gendered spheres of the office or politics versus caretaking and the home, respectively. Klapheck distanced himself from Lautréamont’s influence in his selection of the sewing machine as subject: “A sewing machine expresses so many feelings that there is no need to add anything else.”