Eberhard Havekost

Ausstellung

Malerei, die den Realitätsanspruch von Bildern hinterfragt

Thanks to the almost complete absence of figurative elements, Eberhard Havekost’s recent works mark a visible caesura vis-à-vis his previous oeuvre. He questions the authenticity of pictures, broaching the issue within the medium of painting. This is where means that were developed earlier get connected: reflective or matte areas of projection, frontal views and changes in perspective or the examination of culturally standardized design. The focus of Eberhard Havekost’s artistic practice is the critical reflection of our image-saturated present.He uses photographs as his model – images from TV and video recordings, from magazines and pages torn from catalogues, as well as pictures he takes himself. He chooses matter-of-fact motifs, sometimes he only selects details and turns them into inkjet prints with the aid of the computer. They then serve as points of departure for his painting. However, his works are not depictions of reality but “a reconstruction of the complexity of the real,” as he states himself. In his purposeful investigations, he examines the visual rhetoric of media images and the typical contemporary image types that condition our everyday consumption of images.

Eberhard Havekost was born in Dresden in 1967. From 1991 until 1996, he studied painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden. Today he is one of the most important artists of his generation. In October 2010, he began his tenure as professor at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

This book shows all the paintings from Eberhard Havekost’s last five exhibitions: Entrée (2008), Style & Still (2009), Le maniement nonchalant d’accessoires chers (2009), Retina (2010), Guest (2010) as well as his latest show entitled Ausstellung (2010) at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.
The authors of the texts are Ulrich Loock (Deputy Director Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto), Barry Schwabsky (editor, Artforum, New York), and Jean-Charles Vergne (Director, FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand).