Demivierge

Fusing the objective precision of Neue Sachlichkeit painting with the mechano-morphic irony of Duchamp and Picabia's machine paintings, Demivierge (Half Virgin) is an iconic portrait of a bizarre and impossible machine that Klapheck has rendered with a monumental sense of grandeur and importance. Klapheck first began to paint machines while still a student at the Dusseldorf Academy. When painting a typewriter, he realised that the machine aroused in him a certain undefinable emotion. His subsequent machine paintings aim to transmit a sense of the surreal mystery to the viewer. Often monumentalising his subject matter and adding or distorting certain features of the machine so that it becomes a seemingly nonsensical or irrational apparatus of no identifiable purpose, Klapheck seeks to render his machines as distinct personalities; personalities that echo something about the human body -a device that is, essentially, also a mere mechanism. In this respect there is often something of the medical diagram about Klapheck's uncanny machine portraits.

Running itself on gas, the strange semi-virginal device of Demivierge seems self-sufficient. Not only does the sexual but also impossible title of the painting humanize this machine, but Klapheck has also visually humanized this presumably female mechanical object by rendering the meandering labyrinth of her tubes in such a way that they look like arteries and her gas taps in such a way that seem to form a kind of mask-like visage. The resulting semi-erotic image is one that suggests that this demivierge is the bastard child of both the umbrella and the sewing machine after their chance, and presumably erotic encounter, on the dissecting table.