Die Fesseln der Ehe

While studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf beginning in 1954, Klapheck became immersed in Dada and Surrealism, absorbing the work of pioneers such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, René Magritte, and André Breton. In the wake of World War II, when artists questioned what a proper subject for art could be after the Holocaust, Dada and Surrealism offered tools to critique a society that led to war by turning to the sensual, the unconscious, and the primal. These movements also privileged the uncanniness of the everyday object, recontextualized and deployed to revelatory—and often absurd—effect. At the same moment, with a booming post war economy and a surge in marketing and advertising, artists like Klapheck and, on the other side of the Atlantic, Andy Warhol examined consumer culture as one of desire and want. Klapheck depicted office equipment and technical machinery atop stripped-down backgrounds to accentuate the sensual dimension in otherwise unremarkable objects. Here, a metal, phallic support bar seems to float in front of the yellow surface, and yet it is held in place by a bracket to the right and a receding element to the left. What seems to be floating is actually acutely angled, giving deep, illusionistic space to a picture that appears at first resolutely flat. The white vertical element behind the bar reads immediately like a Barnett Newman zip, piquing a viewer’s reflex to again understand the painting as flat. But upon second glance, the zip coalesces in one’s vision as an edge, articulating not a coextensive plane but a hinged one. The red-and-white rope, which is deployed as through a pulley system with hooks, plugs, and fasteners, also rounds the zip’s corner, until it disappears again out of the picture, to the world beyond.