All painters, everybody, ought to paint from photographs’, proclaimed Gerhard Richter in 1966 in an exhibition catalogue that he wrote together with Sigmar Polke. A century before that painters such as Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas had been fascinated by the photographic image, and Richter’s call for using photographic material (including the importance of the selection process) is now also being followed by Eberhard Havekost.
Havekost draws his images from a digital databank which enables him to manipulate them and possibly combine them with other images. For all of the photographic material selected – an increasingly large part of which he has photographed himself – there follows a process in which he analyses the images and investigates specific qualities in them. In doing this, he poses the question for himself of to what degree the digital (and sometimes modified) images lend themselves for the medium of painting.

Havekost's particular interest in an age of rapid dissemination of images, is the interaction between mass-media perceptions and traditional painting. Havekost paints the optical illusion of how visual experience is represented: his work explores how the act of seeing cannot be faithfully replicated in an image. In his work Havekost focuses on both formal aspects such as colour or texture, or the cropping of a photographic image, and on subjects that are connected with current experience, referring to our visual environment (objects, architecture) or relating to our ‘consumption industry’. In addition he uses photographs that he makes of his girlfriend or playing daughter as subjects for his work.




The catalogue Eberhard Havekost: Harmonie. Bilder | Paintings 1998 - 2005, published by the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and Hatje Cantz, offers a good overview of the oeuvre of Eberhard Havekost.