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He is known for his cool manner of painting and the way in which he analyses and transforms diverse visual subjects. In his work, Havekost focuses on both formal aspects such as color or texture, or the cropping of a photographic image, and on subjects that are connected with current experience, referring to our visual environment (objects, architecture) or relating to our consumption industry.

All painters, everybody, ought to paint from photographs, proclaimed Gerhard Richter in 1966 in an exhibition catalogue. A century before that painters such as Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas had been fascinated by the photographic image, and Richters call for using photographic material (including the importance of the selection process) is now also being followed by Eberhard Havekost.

He draws his images from a digital databank which enables him to manipulate them and possibly combine them with other images. For all of the photographic material selected an increasingly large part of which he has photographed himself there follows a process in which he analyses the images and investigates specific qualities in them.

In the exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, the paintings are clustered around particular themes such as architectonic façades and interiors, figures, automobile wrecks and still lifes.

Havekost is one of a new generation of painters who use the digitized, multi-media visual language in their work. His work has been included in various private collections, such as the Saatchi collection, London, the Sammlung Goetz, Munich, the Sammlung Reingold, Düsseldorf, and the Sammlung Marx, Berlin, and in recent years he has participated in diverse important group exhibitions.

All images courtesy of the Stedelijk Museum