About the Work
‘The Legislator’ is among the key workgroups accounting for Klapheck’s status as one of the most important protagonists in post-war German art. In his paintings of ‘prosaic super-representationality’, he developed a highly individual artistic style with which he deliberately set himself apart from contemporary Informel and Abstract Expressionist currents. Not least in his work titles, the artist ascribes human traits to his depictions of everyday technical devices, thus introducing political, biographical and historical dimensions of meaning. The eponymous ‘legislator’ ‒ a hybrid between a typewriter and a cash register ‒ is furnished with astonishingly despotic features. The artist has ‘portrayed’ the portly monstrosity at an extreme angle from below, lending it a kind of icy authority. To spin the tale further, the machine itself could be a throne, the lever an arm complete with a sceptre, and the keyboard a tablet of the law.
