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Lot Essay
A fusion of the objective precision of Neue Sachlichkeit painting and the mechano-morphic irony of Duchamp and Picabia's machine paintings, Die Frühreife (Precocious Girl) is one of the first of the strange and powerfully erotic series of portrait paintings of bathroom fittings that Konrad Klapheck produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Along with the painting that he entitled Geschwisterliches Liebespaar (Sibling Lovers) of 1958 depicting twin taps and a shower head, Die Frhreife is one two paintings Klapheck made of a shower fitment from his family home that captivated him and which he was magically able to transform into fascinating eroto-mechanical portraits.
Klapheck first began to paint seemingly commonplace and ordinary objects and machines while still a student at the Dusseldorf Academy in the late 1940s. When painting a typewriter, for example he had discovered that the machine aroused in him a certain indefinable emotion. Klapheck's subsequent machine paintings aimed to transmit a profound sense of the surreal mystery he had experienced in front of the object on to the viewer. Often monumentalising his subject matter and adding or distorting certain features of the machine so that it became a seemingly nonsensical or irrational apparatus with a powerful physical presence but no identifiable purpose, Klapheck sought to render his machines as distinct personalities. Such fetishistic humanising of his subject matter led to the creation of images whose mechanical bodies often echoed elements of the human and pointed to a strange parallel between mechanical design and that of the human body which is, in one respect, itself a mere mechanism.
Employing a painterly technique that reflects the sober clarity, precise observation and stark objectivity of the Neue Sachlichkeit tendency in German art of the 1920s, there is often a quality of the medical diagram given to many of Klapheck's decidedly uncanny portraits of machines and other objects. Isolating his subjects against an abstract background in the manner that Ed Ruscha was to emulate with his text paintings a few years later, Klapheck transformed these mechanisms not only into portraits but also devotional images. In his paintings of bathroom taps and shower fittings Klapheck extended this near-devotional approach into the realm of the sexual fetish by deliberately playing on the human elements he saw in their plumbing and by giving these works provocative and suggestive titles that further heightened their sense of a metaphysical or meta-mechanical erotic existence. These were titles such as 'Sibling Lovers', 'The Sex-Bomb and her Companion', 'Love Song', 'The Power of Love', 'The Mistress' or, as here, 'The Precocious Girl'.
Klapheck first began to paint seemingly commonplace and ordinary objects and machines while still a student at the Dusseldorf Academy in the late 1940s. When painting a typewriter, for example he had discovered that the machine aroused in him a certain indefinable emotion. Klapheck's subsequent machine paintings aimed to transmit a profound sense of the surreal mystery he had experienced in front of the object on to the viewer. Often monumentalising his subject matter and adding or distorting certain features of the machine so that it became a seemingly nonsensical or irrational apparatus with a powerful physical presence but no identifiable purpose, Klapheck sought to render his machines as distinct personalities. Such fetishistic humanising of his subject matter led to the creation of images whose mechanical bodies often echoed elements of the human and pointed to a strange parallel between mechanical design and that of the human body which is, in one respect, itself a mere mechanism.
Employing a painterly technique that reflects the sober clarity, precise observation and stark objectivity of the Neue Sachlichkeit tendency in German art of the 1920s, there is often a quality of the medical diagram given to many of Klapheck's decidedly uncanny portraits of machines and other objects. Isolating his subjects against an abstract background in the manner that Ed Ruscha was to emulate with his text paintings a few years later, Klapheck transformed these mechanisms not only into portraits but also devotional images. In his paintings of bathroom taps and shower fittings Klapheck extended this near-devotional approach into the realm of the sexual fetish by deliberately playing on the human elements he saw in their plumbing and by giving these works provocative and suggestive titles that further heightened their sense of a metaphysical or meta-mechanical erotic existence. These were titles such as 'Sibling Lovers', 'The Sex-Bomb and her Companion', 'Love Song', 'The Power of Love', 'The Mistress' or, as here, 'The Precocious Girl'.