COPY + OWNERSHIP: Eberhard Havekost

For his sixth solo exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery, German painter Eberhard Havekost has put together a body of 15 paintings under the title “COPY + OWNERSHIP”. The title declares the painter to be both author and consumer of the images he presents. Havekost’s meticulous and confident painting technique and evidently photographic reference material make it clear that he does not try to remove the images in his paintings from their original context, but instead proposes a reimaging of circumstances surrounding each one. The automated arrangement of colors in a chart-like pattern as seen in certain Gerhard Richter paintings from the late 1960s becomes the exacting labor of a painter mixing colors and layering brush strokes. The act of copying the source material is the precise means by which the painter stakes his claim of ownership. The work opens itself up in the act of looking/viewing and references to the source material (newspaper/ magazine clippings, images drawn from digital media, art books, and personal snapshots) pulse in and out of the viewer’s consciousness. Color fields, atomic tests, images of bathers, a tattooed palm tree, and blurry images taken from flat screen televisions all question our perception of reality as we experience it moment to moment transforming ephemeral images into objects of sustained contemplation.

The work opens itself up in the act of looking/viewing and references to the source material (newspaper/ magazine clippings, images drawn from digital media, art books, and personal snapshots) pulse in and out of the viewer’s consciousness. Color fields, atomic tests, images of bathers, a tattooed palm tree, and blurry images taken from flat screen televisions all question our perception of reality as we experience it moment to moment transforming ephemeral images into objects of sustained contemplation.