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Email PageZensur
September 8, 2007- October 13, 2007
Reception: September 8, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Eberhard Havekost
Anton Kern Gallery
532 W 20th StFor his fifth solo exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery, German painter Eberhard Havekost has put together a body of 16 paintings under the heading “Zensur.” Thematically and formally intertwined, the paintings address and demonstrate the suppression of visual information. The show is held together by a systematic obscuring and blocking-out of certain sections of the image and by a subdued grey and blue palette.
The English reading of the title is “censorship” and suggests a kind of painterly self-experiment on the artist’s part. Three works depict blankets loosely tossed in a pile and painted with photorealism’s attention to the source image and a baroque sense of drapery and transcendental richness. A triptych entitled “Dunkle Modellwelt” (“Dark Model World”) represents buildings shattered into pieces as if wrecked by the invisible hand of a deranged model-maker. A second triptych expands the mode of blocking-out to the point of almost erasing the underlying image of an interior space and thereby generating paintings of highly abstract qualities. However, rather than obscuring the information and leaving it fashionably ambiguous, Havekost draws attention to its multi-layered and charged meanings. Is the depicted bleakness and devastation affected by natural causes? Are the casually tossed textiles actually emergency blankets? Is it an image of the American flag behind the black rectangle? What remains at the painterly core of these works is the performance of visual self-censorship, the psychological and epistemological question of how we deny ourselves to perceive images of the world.
Eberhard Havekost’s work has been exhibited continuously since the early 1990s, most recently in one-person shows at the Tampa Museum of Art (2007), the Stedelijk Museum (2006), the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2005), and the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden (2004). His work has also been included in large group exhibitions such as Imagination Becomes Reality, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2007), Imagens em Pintura, Museu Serralves, Porto, (2006), Trials and Terrors, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, New German Painting, Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes, Triumph of Painting, the Saatchi Gallery, London (all 2005), deutschemalereizweitausenddrei, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt/M. (2003), and Painting at the Edge of the World, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2001). Havekost’s work is included in the following museum collections: MoMA, New York, Tate Modern, London, Los Angeles MOCA.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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