Eberhard Havekost
Take Care is an exhibition of new paintings by Berlin based artist, Eberhard Havekost. Works included in the exhibition, Havekost’s second at Roberts & Tilton, travel from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, Germany. The paintings investigate the relationship between painted images and photographic sources, from which Havekost typically derives his motifs. Havekost’s photographic references drain the image of its recognizability and as Barry Schwabsky notes in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen’s catalogue, Ausstellung: It is liable to distort or decontextualize and thereby alienate things from their images, and this tendency of the photograph to alienate its referent is clearly something that greatly interests the artist. For this reason one would be tempted to describe many of his more recent paintings...as abstract. But on further consideration, it would be better to resist that temptation; it would be better to say that they are like abstractions, or that they resemble abstractions, than that they are abstractions. If anything, it would be preferable to say that they are representations of something that refuses to be identified.