Zelte II

In Zelte II, German painter Eberhard Havekost depicts the yawning height of a 1960s apartment building in his native Dresden seen as though from the window of a passing car. The awkward composition is the point of view of a passenger looking up at row upon row of the identical balconies that make up this sunbathed communist block. The building, set against a flat, bright blue sky, is rendered heavy and static with broad brushstrokes of pure, uniform colour. The dark shadow cast onto the apartment building's façade, however, lends the scene a sense of the ephemeral. In the constant movement of light, a transitory moment is caught and recorded, eternalizing that instant in space and time. Havekost's oeuvre centres on concepts of modernity. In an age of rapid dissemination of images, Havekost, with his eclectic artistic output, digests a vast array of visual information from the mass-media, the internet in particular and from his personal experiences. The original source image for Zelte II, a photograph of a Dresden high rise apartment block, is reduced when transferred onto canvas to raw planes of crisp colour. This detachment from reality is the product of Havekost's working methods. Each source photograph is scanned, then shrunk, stretched, and distorted, some almost to the point of abstraction, before being painted. The result, according to art critic Annelie Lutgens, is not photorealism but photoshoprealism. Painting the image of the image doubly disengages Havekost from his subject, alienating nearly all meaning and creating a style that is simply about artificiality of surface. In our Postmodernist world where texts and images are devoid of meaning, Zelte II no longer refers to its source image just as the communist building block painted no longer represents the ideals of a failed utopian society.

"It motivates me to play with this confusion, to paint trailers and people as if the viewer were just at that moment speeding past them in an express train - in reality, of course, trailers and faces never blur as they fly past, that's just the image we have in our minds of what it should look like. As well as being interested in the view we have of things rushing by, 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 quoted in: Harmonie, exh. cat., Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg 2005, p. 11-12).