Eberhard Havekost

Anton Kern Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 2002

This work is in very good condition overall; evidence of the stretcher bar along the top edge; there are some scattered abrasions along the bottom edge; unframed.
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"I am trying to discover what filters we use in perception, so that we can see how we mistake our impressions for reality." 

(Eberhard Havekost, "Ich male, was ich nicht sehe: Gespräch mit Florian Illies", Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, March 23, 2003, quoted in Eberhard Havekost, Harmonie: Bilder/Paintings 1998-2005, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2005, p. 12)

Eberhard Havekost's luminous paintings employ the oblique visual language of the snapshot.  One has the sense that his subjects typically lurk beyond the frame or in the background, the fragments almost seen from the corner of the eye that prove to be illusory.  It is here within the seemingly ordinary that Havekost locates the mysterious and the alien.

Using personal photographs and found images as source material, Havekost digitally crops parameters, distends proportions and shifts perspective.  Angles become vertiginous, forms are stretched and skewed.  Suddenly the familiar morphs into geometric abstraction, provoking a vague sense of unease.

The present work engages in a dialogue with Dusseldorf-school photography, from the industrial facades of Bernd and Hilla Becher, to the altered realities of Andreas Gursky.  Gursky engages in a similar process of defamiliarization, either by drawing back from his subjects at a great distance, creating a visually-arresting, patterned panorama, or occasionally by zooming in so close that the detail of the weave in a carpet or a fragment of sunrise is transformed into the ethereal.  Like Havekost, Gursky often merges and digitally manipulates his images in order to intensify their formal elements such as color or perspective, thereby creating a world of heightened reality. 

Ultimately, Havekost's take on the modern urban landscape is a striking reminder of the enigmatic beauty located within the everyday.