Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen.
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A facade is a constellation of horizontal
lines and areas of colour. The sky is not space but a blue box in an
even, deep blue, in front of which objects – trees, a brown bear about
to attack – are positioned like props. A face too is nothing more than
a facade; with sunglasses, it appears to be hidden for good, an
impenetrable mask. 
Eberhard Havekost, Click and Fly (1/3), 2000. Courtesy Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, Dresden
For
Eberhard Havekost, born in Dresden in 1967, painting is about surfaces.
The surfaces refer less to the things to which they once belonged and
more to themselves, to the principal of surfaces itself. They have been
doubly disengaged from the object. Havekost paints the image of the
image. User Surface 6 is the name of one of his landscape formats. Flat
functional buildings against a huge sky, pictured as though from a
passing car; a perspective that we've become accustomed to in
photography and film, the urban desert of America. Eberhard Havekost
chased the photograph through a computer program and then copied it off
the screen, as he does with all his originals. The result is not Photorealism but Photoshoprealism, quips Annelie Lütgens, curator of
the Kunstmusem Wolfsburg "Harmony" show, at its opening. 
Hotelsprung, 2003. Dusseldorf, Rheingold Collection
This
is the first major solo exhibition of Havekost in a museum, the product
of a career that took off in a matter of years. Havekost, who studied
in Dresden, belongs to the painters who are attracting a lot of
international attention under the name "Young (East) German Painters".
It's the coolness of his slick portraits and his cold landscapes that
draw praise, as well as what one might call the 'Eastiness' of his
subjects. While one is slightly chilled by the pale children in fitted
kitchens or the rear view of a camouflage jacket - suburban white trash
chic, Havekost's paintings establish a reassuring distance from their
subjects.
Click and Fly (2/3), 2000; Click and Fly (3/3), 2000. Courtesy Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, Dresden
Havekost
plays with evil in an almost "lifestyle magazine" way. He became famous
with his 1998 series on the sniper; in Wolfsburg, he shows a soldier
with a monstrously deformed face and determined look (Stage, 2004), the
portrait of a child murderer in a hood with black bars in front of his
eyes or a confusing patchwork of camouflage material with tanks in the
background. In the series PC, he plays with the allure of the weird in
another way. Faces are presented in two versions; it's up to the viewer
to decide if these are "before" and "after" cosmetic surgery pictures
or the product of digital manipulation. 
PC 3 (1/2), 2002; PC 3 (2/2), 2002. Private collection
Havekost
says that working with photographic originals relieves him of the
pressure of having to compose - rather than invent, he just has to
select. The transfer of the image from the computer onto the canvas is
more than mere redundancy for him; it brings the flow of images to a
standstill and makes them viewable. In his most recent work, Havekost
has stopped using others people's pictures and is taking photographs
himself of, for instance, the kaput garages of his hometown Dresden,
such as in the series Rusty Places. In Wolfsburg, the results of
Havekost's trip through the USA in January of this year are being shown
for the first time: among others, the series "Destiny" with various
perspectives of a car wreck that he found at the side of a road near
the Grand Canyon. There are six monumental views of a trashed car in
dirty brown, illuminated with a flash from the front so that the
background disappears in darkness. 
Mobile 4/4, 2000. Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden
This
is roughly how Pop Art of the 1960s created metaphors for the failure
of the American dream. But wait, here we're dealing with more than
metaphors; here we're dealing with surfaces. The question remains, why?
But this kind of art obviously doesn't want to be asked questions of
meaning – it's just playing with the mask of coolness. But as anyone
who has spent an evening in an extremely cool venue wearing extremely
cool sunglasses and the super-cool military look knows, coolness and
boredom are closely related.
*
The exhibition "Harmonie. Bilder/ Paintings 1998 - 2005" at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg runs until February 19, 2005.
This article originally appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau on November 11, 2005.
Elke Buhr is art critic and editor at the Frankfurter Rundschau.
Translation: nb
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