Harmonie

What is it that makes the paintings of Eberhard Havekost, who was born in Dresden in 1967, so disquieting, so ambiguous? Photographic perspectives with large-format brushwork, and controlled distortion with a sense of precise sectioning are part of it. Yet most of all, it is a sort of impenetrability, which continually forces the gaze used to viewing painting - the lingering gaze - to slip and slide over the surfaces. Havekost often appropriates media images from television and newspapers in his paintings, and, most recently, also adapts motifs from his own photographs, which he then manipulates with the aid of a computer. However, unlike Gerhard Richter, Havekost is not involved in a painter's skeptical attempt to increase the value of the photographic subject, but with media's skeptical way of dealing with the photograph as a document.This publication, which includes essays by Susanne Kohler, Annelie Lutgens, and Ludwig Seyfarth, is the first to collect Eberhard Havekost's paintings from the last seven years, whose central themes are the figure and housing, windows and facades, and "leisure-time vehicles."