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Lot Essay
Eberhard Havekost, the young Dresden-born artist, is a prominent figure among the German avant-garde. His work fits neatly into the tradition of German 'Sachlichkeit' and trends of turning edited digital photo-material into the ingredients of ambitious painterly exercises.
The artist's method is ethnographic. He shoots photos at skewed angles and prevents these personal mementos from sinking to the level of pre-received postcard compositions. A gradual removal from reality is rendered thus through the process of photographing, editing and painting on enlarged canvases and while the basic photo-image is retained, the painstaking execution heightens the banality that is released from these pictures.
All the elements that the artist may have hitherto perceived as deficient are removed and the viewer is presented with an anonymous surface so smooth that he cannot hinge any geographical associations on it. Adding to the unfamiliar subject are the distinctly confusing titles, which make his paintings at once recognizable and yet profoundly bewildering.
Intro I is the first picture in a series of snapshots of the same Cessna aeroplane depicted at various angles and cut off at the edge of the canvas. Again no indication is made of what season or time of day the original photo was taken and one cannot help but wonder what may have given the artist the impulse to record this exact moment.
It seems as though what is important in his work is not the image itself, but the dialogue that is generated by it. Through presenting his audience with this kind of imagery Havekost seems to takes the onlooker on a journey as he zaps through his own experiences of the world that that surrounds him and which he is trying to fathom through the act of picture making.
The artist's method is ethnographic. He shoots photos at skewed angles and prevents these personal mementos from sinking to the level of pre-received postcard compositions. A gradual removal from reality is rendered thus through the process of photographing, editing and painting on enlarged canvases and while the basic photo-image is retained, the painstaking execution heightens the banality that is released from these pictures.
All the elements that the artist may have hitherto perceived as deficient are removed and the viewer is presented with an anonymous surface so smooth that he cannot hinge any geographical associations on it. Adding to the unfamiliar subject are the distinctly confusing titles, which make his paintings at once recognizable and yet profoundly bewildering.
Intro I is the first picture in a series of snapshots of the same Cessna aeroplane depicted at various angles and cut off at the edge of the canvas. Again no indication is made of what season or time of day the original photo was taken and one cannot help but wonder what may have given the artist the impulse to record this exact moment.
It seems as though what is important in his work is not the image itself, but the dialogue that is generated by it. Through presenting his audience with this kind of imagery Havekost seems to takes the onlooker on a journey as he zaps through his own experiences of the world that that surrounds him and which he is trying to fathom through the act of picture making.