Since the 1950s, German painter Konrad Klapheck has been producing a rigorous body of work. The bulk of his extraordinarily focused artistic career comprises a continued painterly investigation of technological machines and everyday objects such as typewriters, sewing machines, and ventilators. The artist s canvases, however, are not mere depictions; the objects Klapheck presents are subtly anthropomorphized and charged with psychological, social, and political meaning. A telephone, for example, takes on a playful, eroticized quality in one canvas, while a typewriter becomes a menacing object evocative of brute power in another. An artist s artist, Klapheck has never painted according to fashions dictated by the art world; he is a painter guided by his own obsessions. However, his work bears a number of crucial relationships to the history of painting and to the artistic and intellectual concerns of postwar art. In its unexpected combination of deadpan depiction and evocative playfulness, Klapheck s canvases forge an important link in twentieth-century art, melding elements from Surrealism and Pop Art with a singular painterly sensibility to create a uniquely influential body of work.