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Eberhard Havekost
Eberhard Havekost: Goldener; Frank Nitsche: Der Springer; Thomas Scheibitz: Das Kalte Herz
Goldener – ‘Golden One’; Der Springer – ‘the Jumper’; Das kalte Herz – ‘the Cold Heart’: we are in the land of fairytales. These little known nineteenth-century stories were written by Hans Christian Andersen, Wilhelm Hauff and Ludwig Bechstein but the content of the tales appears to have been less important for the three East German painters brought together in this exhibition than the playful opportunity offered by their titles. The three men are, as in all good fairytales, close friends, if not brothers. Having studied in Dresden at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, they now live and work separately, in different cities, two hours apart: Havekost still in Dresden; Scheibitz and Nitsche, in the ‘city of twelve hundred cranes’, the new-Berlin-in-the-making.
Dresden, best known for the blanket bombings that razed it to the ground in 1945, is a city of painters. It was the adopted home of Casper David Friedrich; meeting point of the founding members of Die Brücke; birthplace of Gerhard Richter and AR Penck as well as Eugen Schönebeck (Baselitz’s friend and Pandemonium collaborator). It is also, clearly, a city of artistic departures – Friedrich’s prolonged visits home to Pomerania; Die Brücke’s exodus to Berlin; Richter and Penck’s more political emigrations to the West. The tradition now continues with Nitsche and Scheibitz moving to Berlin during the 1990s.
Eberhard Havekost, Frank Nitsche and Thomas Scheibitz share the same artistic heritage: the experience of studying art in the elegant, rebuilt, classical edifice of the Dresden Academy (the Hochschule für Bildende Künste). Despite the inevitable weight of tradition, of tried and tested methods of learning, the Academy was for these students still the, ‘best possible place to be’ . Changes were already underway there, yet despite this, all three artists prefer to work in oil – the most traditional of all painting media. They know how to place their forms, to balance the composition, to lead the eye across the surface, to create varieties of texture, mixings of colour. They enjoy the fact that painting takes time; that changes can be made, that paint is viscous and that its physical application can be controlled and cajoled.
The Gemälde Galerie Neue Meister, with its treasure trove of Friedrichs, sits next to the Academy. Exuding the atmosphere of Dresden tradition, it shows what the younger artists are up against, in terms of their own take on landscape being understood locally. Yet something of the particular quality of the Dresden light found in the nineteenth-century landscapes of Ferdinand von Rayski, Christian Friedrich Gille and Adrian Ludwig Richter, not to mention Friedrich himself, may perhaps be traced in the bright tonalities of some of the paintings by Havekost, Nitsche and Scheibitz. In the twentieth-century collection, a small Gerhard Richter painting of a dog, Jockel, das Hündchen Will Grohmanns, (1967) and a powerfully architectonic view of Dresden’s railway arch, Eisenbahnüberführung Dresden Löbtau (1910 – 26) by Kirchner, suggest links, in differing ways, to the interests of the three student artists who were studying at the time these paintings were acquired by the museum in 1991. The canine portrait, with its close-framing edge and obvious debt to a photographic snapshot, is not so distant in approach from Havekost’s small-scale, full-frontal faces culled from magazines. While the view of the railway’s underbelly with its tight diagonals, strongly contrasting colours and forceful compositional thrust is not so far away from Scheibitz’s handling of space or Nitsche’s love of the anarchic vista.
Despite possible formal echoes, these artists consciously distance themselves today from any displays of Romanticism and emotion in either their depictions or thoughts of landscape. They see no room for these in today’s cultural climate where all visions and views of nature are already mediated by the endless proliferation and transformation of the image, photographic, digital, electronic or virtual. In this way perhaps, they are heirs to Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke who knew the force of the photograph and advertising graphic to make us rethink our views on the meaning of ‘representation’ and ‘reality’. Like others of their generation, their interests extend to the wider contemporary culture of digital manipulation and globalized merchandising. They look at the world as conveyed through television, film and in particular, the colour magazine and the advertising spread: objects, animals, people, designed, re-designed, packaged, clingfilm-wrapped, pixillated, tinted, collaged, re-formed, reshaped, visual equivalents of genetic modification. They also know just how far recognition of an image draws upon the multifarious system of existing media icons and product codes. Three stripes equals Adidas, a broad white tick equals Nike.
Each of these three artists keeps stacks of ring-binder folders, and drawers full of as yet unsorted images, individual and personal records culled both from the German press and their foreign travels. These are the source books for their paintings. In fact, the scrapbook turns out to be something of a Dresden tradition – members of all three artists’ families collected material in such a way and it was the realisation of the potential of artistic cross-referencing apparent in Nitsche’s meticulous collection which prompted Havekost to start making albums of his own . The vast wealth of visual information which the artists gather in this way seems more poignant and revealing in respect of the cultural and political difference which separates them from their childhood. Growing up in the DDR during the 1960s, (ironically at the height of celebratory Pop elsewhere) availability of consumer choice was severely circumscribed. As children, their toys were all identical, each child owning the same make for the simple reason that this was all there was. Moreover, before travel to the West was any sort of possibility, imaginative escape inevitably came from fairytales. Now, ten years after the political seismas, no choice is replaced with abundant alternative – at least in theory – and these specific acts of personal archiving serve to highlight this; but meanwhile, the fairytale motif heightens this sense of watershed.
Eberard Havekost: Goldener
Havekost is the one that stayed behind, his quiet working method and temperament less suited to the distractions of Berlin. His paintings are made slowly, deliberately and with immense care. Each portrait head is composed in colour over a series of six underlying and alternating coats of grey and white. The bare outline is trapped in between these layers, a ghostly apparition awaiting embodiment through the physicality of coloured pigment. Faces and houses are for him, simply carriers for the colour. However, it is also important to him that the faces and houses are shown together so that they play off each other. The houses are faceless but their very anonymity perversely provides animation to the mask-like faces – or sometimes it works the other way. This tactic of co-ordinated display sets up a particular relationship: the faces act as silent witnesses. While a sense of narrative is usually expelled from the individual compositions (unlike Edward Hopper’s to whose work their atmosphere bears some comparison), it is partially reinstated by this approach to installation.
As far as the choice of image is concerned, the portraits derive from photographs of faces found in Der Spiegel, while the idea of working with houses stemmed from Havekost’s visit to Frankfurt in 1996 when he started looking at the new city housing programmes. From the real to the image, the experience led him to Holiday House catalogues, and from there, to making his painted versions which more recently are derived from his own photographic shots of houses encountered on walks. His attraction to the theme of housing projects is reminiscent of Dan Graham’s Homes for America series (originally published in Arts Magazine, Dec.1966 – Jan.1967) which he discovered himself only in 1997. Havekost’s own reaction to social housing is ambiguous. He may not feel drawn to the architecture but he recognises the social importance of housing schemes – a matter which for the onlooker bears an additional resonance in terms of the post -War reconstruction of his own bombed-out city.
Havekost’s use of the serial view in Grau 1, DD 00, Grau 2, DD 00, and Grau 3, DD 00, (where the same house is shown from three different angles) as well as his deployment of the close-up face (as in the three portrait heads in this exhibition), seems to relate, at least in part to the tradition of Düsseldorf photography found in the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher and Thomas Struth. However, the inspiration for his choice of image and the use of compositional cut-off in fact stems not so much from art-as-photography as from film (although he also freely acknowledges his admiration for Andreas Gursky’s images of ‘professional claustrophobia’ and Roni Horn’s landscapes and photographed TV images.) More than Scheibitz and Nitsche, Havekost is fascinated by the psychological aspect that cinema provides, even if this is in a generic rather than particular sense. There is often a strong atmosphere to his work – an implicit hint of menace, lurking behind the blank facades. Although this feeling may be generated by the very quietness of the image, it is also at times prompted by a perspectival disjuncture which he likes to exploit. The side of a caravan inOhne Title, DD 00, for example, is tipped-up, viewed at a rakish angle; in Gray 1-3, the normal sequential reading of three-angled views of the same house is disrupted by hanging the canvases out of synch. In terms both of atmosphere and settings, one is reminded of a David Lynch movie, and like Lynch’s filmmaking, in his paintings Havekost keeps interpretative options open.
His main area of interest pivots conceptually on the idea of the film still: how a multi-framed film can at one moment become frozen and transfixed on the video/TV screen, be turned into a photograph and then translated from this state into a painting. The various levels of mediated reality thus culminate, through this filtering process, in a painted fiction. For the audience however, further interest lies in the painterly transformation: we become absorbed by the blurring of the brush (as Havekost admits, how can you avoid Richter?); the way in which touches of light are transmogrified into a simple brown brushmark on the foliage of a tree, or into a series of dots crossing a green border of grass; how the smoothness of plastered masonry is rendered in swathes of horizontally sweeping white pigment. This is the touch of gold (Goldener): the painting techniques of the Old Masters applied to a set of concerns that are purely contemporary.
Frank Nitsche: Der Springer
While Havekost investigates the psychological aspect of buildings and Scheibitz is interested in both this and architectures function, Frank Nitsche prefers the shattered houses and demolition equipment viewed on building sites in Berlin. In his studio, he wields an electric circular saw and attacks a painting to demonstrate its efficacy in rubbing away unwanted layers of pigment. He wants the forms in his paintings to be cut-off at the top in order to make them appear ‘offensive’. His paintings are huge in relation to his own frame and his pleasure and investment is in the very physical act of painting. It is the oil, colour and smell of pigment that are vital to his interest in the medium, even if his technique is unthorthodox. A student work hanging on his studio wall, painted when he was eighteen, highlights the difference. The painting is a small-scale, very traditional and highly competent still life which gives dignity to a can of condensed milk - a Pop subject, but rendered in the tradition of Chardin. His current work consists of large, abstract, helmeted heads which loom towards the viewer, composed mostly of pale shades of pink, yellow and green, aggressively and unevenly applied, and traversed by black lines that energetically define the forms and pull the composition and colour areas into shape.
Nitsche loves revealing his tracks – the surfaces of his works are criss-crossed with the marks of what had once been there at an earlier point in the making. Traces of black paint mark out the trajectory of previous graphic arcs and reveal his interest in line, equally evident in the drawings he makes as a separate activity to painting. If this strategy of disclosure, which involves endless removals and re-workings, bears a distant affinity to the technique of Willem De Kooning, the subject matter could not be further away. Nitsche mixes contemporary high design with visceral colouring and anthropoid forms, as in WD II, 1998. A series of which this painting is part, shows views of crashed car bonnets combined with heady reds and purples and acid greens, WD VIII, 1998: not unlike Warhol’s Disaster series, only more abstracted and imploded. The mangled car bonnets derive as much from a technical drawing, reproduced in a newspaper, of a robotic arm simulating a head-on vehicular collision, as they do from journalistic photos of crashes.
Like Paul Virilio, whom he admires, or JG Ballard, Nitsche seems to have a fascinated obsession/revulsion for the consequences of contemporary speed. Yet this is always mediated by his interest in formal and stylistic transformation. As he puts it himself, ‘In my view, all aspects of social life are designed. I understand my work as the resume and essence of all design, so to say, the deformed design of the Zeitgeist, the over-design and the distortion of the over-design’.
MBC 14 , 2000, links the car series to the helmeted heads and indicates the degree to which the new works continue Nitsche’s fascination with speed, simulation and high-tech design. As before, the paintings are rendered with the immense energy and impasto stroke that only oil paint can lend the image. His marks are wild and chaotic at times, exciting to witness and varied to considerable degree. As for the sources, visual references for the new works abound in his studio. Images cut from the pages of colour magazines are tacked to the wall, revealing how his varied visual interests feed into the futuristic helmeted head shapes in the new paintings. Particularly notable is the photo of the first speaking robot from Japan; a sombre Darth Vader; an Applemac aerodynamically viewed in profile; a large colour photo of a frog; a rocket in flight; a black-and-white image of the proboscises of magnified insects and the sharp snout of a shark. Along with other juxtaposed magazine cut-outs collected in his meticulously arranged albums, this cross-section demonstrates how Nitsche deftly collages disparate materials and then visually translates this mélange into his finished paintings, creating a bizarre abstract mutation, quite his own.
Thomas Scheibitz: Das Kalte Herz
Scheibitz’s involvement with American culture is the most marked of the three artists as many of his titles and themes attest. As with the quirky title of his previous London show, Low Sweetie, The Cold Heart references both the film and the name of the central computer at Silicon Valley, California. Following trips to Tokyo and an extended trip in 1999 to Columbus, Ohio, Scheibitz became actively aware of how travelling and the energy of being in a large city was vital to his practice. Hence, his move to Berlin from Dresden four years ago.
Like his two friends, Scheibitz uses mediated sources for his compositional approach, and also keeps a collection of images in a series of ring-binders. But, in addition, his studio contains drawers full of paper cut-outs, including stacks of manga cartoons, magazines and sundry fliers imported back from Japan, which he places on the floor to make surprising visual connections and to stimulate some of his imagery. His particular technique involves juxtaposing small details taken from different design sources. He might extract a section from one magazine spread (such as the silhouette-double of a woman in a perfume ad, heavily indebted to Surrealism) and then juxtapose it to another culled from a totally different source (such as a flower, based on an eighteenth-century print which has been digitally manipulated, rendering it a genetic aberrant. Using both the conceptual incongruity and spatial possibilities of these kinds of visual abutments, Scheibitz jams his chosen elements together as if composing a collage.
However, it is the process and material quality of painting itself, in tandem with the importance to the artist of a governing idea, which allows the space for this collaging act to become imaginatively ‘translated’ – to be made other than the mere sum of its sundry parts. There is always room for surprise; one minute we look at what seems a purely abstract landscape – next, the profile of a man emerges from the dabs of paint to form a helmeted motorbike rider, Bob, 2000. Throughout his work, the rich texture of Scheibitz’s surfaces shows his ability to handle the stuff of paint, the rapid gestures trailing drips behind. He doesn’t shy away from risking a wide expanse of white as in Treffpunkt (dating place), 2000, which is made active by the application of paint.
The underlying intention that emerges from Scheibitz’s work is a reflection on the way we see the world in our daily lives: he examines how things are brought together in the everyday, in the disparate and speeding visual world which constitutes our technological and media-saturated inheritance and which now threatens to homogenise whole tranches of the globe. In today’s advanced world, where anyone can play with computer design and where advertising provides a range of very direct visual codes to which we have become readily accustomed, Scheibitz wants to relate to the public perception of what an abstract sign means. His painting Schriftbild, 2000, for example, investigates signage in a series of bright, day-glo colours that ironically present the advertising message as a mass of unrelated characters, a series of visual and verbal puns. Paintings like this also cross the old figuration/abstraction divide which once reflected the equally divided political agendas of Germany during the post-War, Iron Curtain years. Trickstars, 2000 is also a case in point. The spiky composition refers to special effects in a movie but in terms of visual associations, its jagged contours seem close to the work of the Berlin-born painter, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, whose abstract paintings were connected to a specifically political agenda in the years after the War. In the liberal, post-Wall context of today, Scheibitz is free to develop his own abstraction without the political agenda of those times.
Yet memory seems to play a part in Scheibitz’s work. The passage of time involved with the act of painting almost uniquely allows space for reflection, and room for the artist’s own personality to filter perception. Many of his images seem distantly familiar and strongly atmospheric: landscapes with wooden fences, whitewashed houses, paths that zigzag through the countryside as in CLANC, 1998. Other works, such as Heidestrasse, 2000 also evoke childhood with its picture-book memories. However, reassuring associations are suddenly forced awry with overgrown flowers blooming incongruously in unlikely places, nature run amok, in an overly modified environment.
Scheibitz tends to define his own art by what it is not; it isn’t poetic, private, idealistic, didactic or concerned with narrative. His main questions seem to revolve around the issues of the basis of a composition and that which makes it contemporary. Inevitably perhaps, some of his compositional devices have led to critical comparisons with art of the 1960s. Yet although the flat planes and the black outlines may have a superficial connection to paintings of that decade his space is in fact activated by concerns also stemming from early Modernism: the perspectival ‘jumps’ in late Cubism, say. He certainly plays with the style of the 1960s, aware of its attractions, but he filters that experience through the lens of today. Despite possible connections to Lichtenstein in terms of compositional approach and stylistic referencing, Scheibitz’s compositions are very ‘now’ - not least in their very ‘Pop-iness’.
Unlike the work of many of his contemporaries abroad though, Scheibitz’s paintings are not concerned with surface. In an era when new painting seems to be either a matter of hybridisation – of pushing things to the limit in terms of what constitutes ‘painting’ by the incorporation of non-traditional methods and media – or a matter of creating images where the choice of medium is less important than the conceptual approach, what we find in Havekost, Nitsche and Scheibitz is three artists who all push at the limits of their own training and still come out working in the most traditional of materials: oil on canvas . What is particularly intriguing is that they have done this through choice, trying out other approaches and yet each coming back to oil. The work of these artists has undoubtedly been enriched by their belated exposure to western media and design. Viewing it from a British perspective allows us, on our part, to reconsider the possibilities of a medium that many of our prominent young artists of late have tended to neglect or ignore.
London, Summer 2000
More on Eberhard Havekost
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| CV | |
| Bibliography | |
| Exhibitions | |
| Background 16 Mar—14 Apr 2007 | |
| Dynamic UND 31 Oct—6 Dec 2003 | |
 | Related Links |
| http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb... Goethe-Institut, London | |
| http://www.saatchi-gallery.... Saatchi Gallery, London | |
| http://www.artnews.info/gal... Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam | |
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