When his teacher, Bruno Goller, at the Düsseldorf Art Academy gave Konrad Klapheck the task of painting a still life in 1954, he decided to depict an old Continental typewriter, which would be his first “Machine Picture”, marking the beginning of a lifelong fascination with the orchestration of objects. Contrary to all trends, he devoted himself to representational painting at the academy over the following years, thus opposing the prevailing dictum of abstraction, especially that of Informalism and Tachism. His training at the Düsseldorf Academy formed the backdrop for a unique artistic oeuvre in which everyday objects such as typewriters, sewing machines, and faucets become projections of human emotions, desires, and conflicts.

In addition to depictions of identifiable, real objects, Konrad Klapheck also created works that resemble specific objects, however, without having any explicitly recognizable function. While their appearance is based on particular machines or objects, their actual design is more closely related to the task the artist intended them to fulfill. “Der Bigamist” (The Bigamist) from 1965 is a prime example of this group of paintings of fictitious constructions. Although the silver-gray structure on a bright blue background is suggestive of a kind of bell or siren, it nevertheless seems to be the artist’s own invention. In the 1966 exhibition catalog of the Kestner Society, where the work was shown for the first time a year after its creation, “The Bigamist” is described as follows: "Fictitious construction. The man is in the center, with his two wives to his left and right. The ornamental background forms an inverted cross." (Wieland Schmied, Konrad Klapheck, exhibition catalog, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, 1966, p. 35).

In “ Der Bigamist ”, Konrad Klapheck successfully creates a trenchant and striking staging of the reversal of human moral concepts, not only by allowing his machine to slip into the role of morally questionable characters, but also by literally turning Christian values upside down with the inverted cross in the background. In the same year, he created “Der Krieg” (The War), probably the artist's best-known work today. Around the same time, his works were shown in Paris for the first time, and he also took part in the last major Surrealism exhibition, “L'Écart absolu” at the Galerie de l'Œil. A year earlier, he had already participated in documenta III in Kassel. It was an extremely successful period for Konrad Klapheck, who, since his early days, had devoted himself to artistic themes of human life in an incomparably humorous and intelligent way. [AR]