An overview of the German artist's work, through a selection of paintings from 2006 to 2016.
Inhalt concentrates on Eberhard Havekost's painting from the past ten years, focusing on work first exhibited at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (October 23, 2016–February 19, 2017). The work's heterogeneity is evident in the selection of subjects, as well as the styles employed. This extreme range characterizes Havekost's artistic work as a whole. The artist situates his paintings in complex interrelationships, where connections and relevancies are constantly reconfigured, forming a continuously growing web.
The starting points for Havekost's painting are manifold—from his own photographs, an ad from a fashion magazine, and an illustrated book that the artist received as a gift in his childhood, to images from television, films, and the Internet. As he develops his subjects, he may digitally edit the images and then use the techniques of painting to reflect on the function and role of pictures as well as their authenticity. What do we actually see? How much reality is contained in the surface of things and their depictions? Where do content (in German, Inhalt) and meaning exist, and how do they get deformed into something different and new?
In addition to an essay by the Basel-based art historian Invar-Torre Hollaus and a preface by Andreas Fiedler, the catalogue supplements the level of the picture with a level consisting of text snippets and quotations. Content—the individual image, the individual text fragment—cannot be reduced to one context. Rather, it stands for a boundless network and radical relativity.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition, KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin, from October 23, 2016, to February 19, 2017.
The painter Eberhard Havekost (born 1967 in Dresden, lives and works in Berlin) is among the most important German artists of his generation. The starting point for his painting is his own or found photographs, which he digitally edits and then uses as templates for his paintings. Havekost thus makes use of the latest advances in digital photo editing, while also dealing with the effects of the endless production of images through digital media. With an impressive radicalness, the artist questions the authenticity of images: What is it that we see? How much reality is in the surface of things and their likenesses?
