Eberhard Havekost makes dense, anti-gestural paintings that explore the tension between a highly mediated image and the visceral immediacy of a seductively painted surface. Working from shots from TV and video, images from magazines and catalogues and his own photographs, he selects subjects ranging from anonymous buildings, trains and trailers, and modifies them - sometimes just painting a section of the image - to make inkjet prints as the departure point for his paintings.

Eberhard Havekost is the youthful shooting star of the internationally acclaimed Leipzig School. His images, dubbed "photoshop realism" by critics are cool and distanced. Havekost makes the on-screen computer image the direct subject of his painting. The user interface is his painterly theme and how the images appear on it, electronically manipulated, or rather beautified and illuminated from behind. Simple, almost trivial objects filtered electronically and mutated are painted to canvas by Havekost. Mutants of reality transformed into paintings that exude a mysterious bleakness. Our book, edited and complete with an introduction by Berlin art expert Heiner Bastian, offers an overview of Havekost's oeuvre to date and is being published on the occasion of an exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

Work by three East German artists.

Eberhard Havekost: Background16 Mar-14 Apr 2007. Hoxton Square. Eberhard Havekost, one of the most innovative surveyors of figuration in contemporary painting, exhibited a body of new work for his exhibition at White Cube Hoxton Square. Eberhard Havekost makes dense, anti-gestural paintings that explore the tension between a highly mediated image and the visceral immediacy of a seductively painted surface.

Thanks to almost complete absence of figurativee elements, Eberhard Havekost's recent works mark a visible caesura. He questions the authenticity of pictures, broaching the issue within the medium of the painting. This is where means that were developed earlier get connected: reflective or matte areas of projection, frontal views and changes in perspective, or the examinations of culturally standarized design. Eberhard Havekost was born in Dresden in 1967. Today he is one of the most important artists of his generation. In October 2010, he began his tenure as professor at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf.

"What is it that makes the paintings of Eberhard Havekost, who was born in Dresden in 1967, so disquieting, so ambiguous? Photographic perspectives with large-format brushwork, and controlled distortion with a sense of precise sectioning are part of it. Yet most of all, it is a sort of impenetrability, which continually forces the gaze used to viewing painting - the lingering gaze - to slip and slide over the surfaces. Havekost often appropriates media images from television and newspapers in his paintings, and, most recently, also adapts motifs from his own photographs, which he then manipulates with the aid of a computer. However, unlike Gerhard Richter, Havekost is not involved in a painter's skeptical attempt to increase the value of the photographic subject, but with media's skeptical way of dealing with the photograph as a document." "This publication, which includes essays by Susanne Kohler, Annelie Lutgens, and Ludwig Seyfarth, is the first to collect Eberhard Havekost's paintings from the last seven years, whose central themes are the figure and housing, windows and facades, and "leisure-time vehicles.""--BOOK JACKET.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Fla. and three other institutions between Dec. 1, 2004 and July 15, 2007.

The pictures of Eberhard Havekost (b. Dresden 1967; lives and works in Berlin) are the results of a persistent analysis of the outward appearance of our world. The city constitutes a central environment of his life and experience, supplying Havekost with motifs and situations that phenotypically reflect the urban lifeworlds of a rising consumer society. He integrates these complex structures into his works by using details, for example, of facades, streets, cars, shop windows, and passerby. Filtered and transformed by the painter's art, these views of everyday life condense into a stocktaking of contemporary manifestations of architecture, mobility, communication, consumption, and leisure. Havekost's pictures may be seen as exemplary formulations, resonance chambers abounding with experiences of the urban way of life. As part of the culture year "Germany and India 2011-2012: Infinite Opportunities," whose themetatic focus is on "CitySpaces," two Indian museums present solo shows of Eberhard Havekost's work; he is the only German artist to receive this honor.

This group of 19 new works by Eberhard Havekost form a visual caesura in the artist's work and yet are a precise development of his engagement with the questions of the reality of the image within his oeuvre.