June 16, 2026 - October 18, 2026
Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany
"The "painter and thinker" Eberhard Havekost (1967-2019) was one of the great hopes of contemporary German art and, since the beginning of the 21st century, has also attracted international attention from public museums and renowned private collections through exhibitions and acquisitions. His visual language uniquely combined the precise representation of the visible world with the conditions of perception itself, particularly with the digital "user interfaces" of smartphones, tablets, and image editing software. As a result, his works always appear cool and highly contemporary, yet simultaneously possess a visual enigma: through cropping, focusing, and deliberate "blow-up effects," they disrupt hasty expectations and sometimes resemble painterly explorations beneath the surface of digital modernity. Trained in the mid-1990s at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, living in Berlin and traveling extensively, and finally teaching as a professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 2010 until his untimely death, Havekost masterfully combined Eastern and Western influences. The retrospective at the Museum Kurhaus Kleve is conceived as the first major posthumous museum exhibition, aiming to familiarize a local audience with the oeuvre of this innovative visual researcher through significant series of works and to underscore his place within recent art history through the exhibition, publication, and series of talks." - Museum Kurhaus Kleve
Learn more by visiting the museum's website here.
