Eberhard Havekost

Eberhard Havekost (1967 – 5 July 2019) He completed an internship as a stonemason in 1985. In 1989, he fled to the West via Budapest and lived in Frankfurt. He studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden from 1991 to 1996, where he became a master student under Professor Ralf Kerbach in 1997. In 1999 he was awarded the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff grant. He lived in Berlin and was a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Working from photographic sources – shots from TV and video, images culled from magazines and catalogues and his own photographs – he selected subjects ranging from anonymous buildings, trains and trailers, and modified them to make inkjet prints as the departure point for his paintings. Among the subjects which regularly recur are nature, portraits or figures, architectural interiors and exteriors, and means of transportation such as caravans, aeroplanes and automobiles. Retina is a 2010 series of six oil paintings that deal with the optical perception of the world of objects and their abstraction.

In 2005, art critic David Pagel described Havekost in the Los Angeles Times as "a promising painter so deeply indebted to Richter's version of abbreviated Photorealism that it appears he has not yet come into his own". In The New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote that "the blunt dispatch and immediacy of Mr. Havekost's surfaces, while suitably laconic, run counter to the randomness and remove of the images, providing a necessary disconcerting tension."

Collection Works by Havekost are found in the stock of the Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum as well as in the Marx Collection, the Rubell Family Collection, the Frieder Burda Collection, and the Tate Collection.