DISPLAY

Eberhard Havekost, Frank Nitsche, Stefanie Hollerbach, Tatjana Doll, Thoralf Knobloch

“The realisation that modern man defends himself against sensory overload by becoming desensitised is already more than a century old. […] Strangely enough, it was only Eberhard Havekost (1967–2019) who first had the idea of making this desensitised way of seeing the subject of his painting in its own right.”
(quoted from: Michael Kohler, ‘Everything’s so beautifully colourful here’. The first posthumous retrospective of the painter Eberhard Havekost, who died young, in: ART-Kunstmagazin, June 2026, p. 110)

In Art Magazin’s preview of the exhibition on Eberhard Havekost at the Museum Kurhaus Kleve – the first major retrospective following his death, featuring over 200 paintings and accompanying prints – we came across this quote by the author Michael Kohler.

Inspired by the precision of this statement, we are responding to it with this exhibition. We would like to explore it in greater depth and examine the thesis from various angles. Naturally, this will not provide exhaustive answers. Not least because of the short turnaround time and, above all, because direct dialogue with Eberhard is, sadly, no longer possible. We would have loved to hear what he would have thought or said about this quote. The discussion would certainly have been intense; indeed, it might well have struck at the very heart of Havekost’s art.

The exhibition presents various approaches to painting that explore this idea.