Eberhard Havekost

Eberhard Havekost (born 1967 in Dresden) is a contemporary German painter based in Berlin and Dresden. In 1985 he completed an internship as a stonemason. He studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden from 1991–1996, where he became a master student under Professor Ralf Kerbach in 1997. In 1999 he was awarded the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff grant.

Havekost is one of a new generation of painters who use the digitalized, multimedial visual language in their work. Working from photographic sources – shots from TV and video, images culled from magazines and catalogues and his own photographs – he selects subjects ranging from anonymous buildings, trains and trailers, and modifies them to make inkjet prints as the departure point for his paintings. Among the subjects which regularly recur are nature, portraits or figures, architectural interiors and exteriors, and means of transportation such as caravans, aeroplanes and automobiles. He often paints series of repetitive images to replicate the serial change of visual effect in nature. The theme of a 2007 25-part series of paintings is zensur or censorship, and the artist applies the concept of blocking or erasing something thematically or formally.Retina is a 2010 series of six oil paintings that deal with the optical perception of the world of objects and their abstraction.

In 2005, art critic David Pagel described Havekost in the Los Angeles Times as "a promising painter so deeply indebted to Richter's version of abbreviated Photorealism that it appears he has not yet come into his own". In the New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote that "the blunt dispatch and immediacy of Mr. Havekost's surfaces, while suitably laconic, run counter to the randomness and remove of the images, providing a necessary disconcerting tension."

Works by Havekost are found in the stock of the Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum as well as in the Marx Collection, the Rubell Family Collection, der Frieder Burda Collection, and the Tate Collection. He is represented by Anton Kern [1] in New York and Galerie Gebr. Lehmann [2] in Dresden and Berlin.

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