Eberhard Havekost

Eberhard Havekost was born on 12 October 1967 in Dresden, in what was then East Germany. He attended the Dresdner Kreuzschule and completed his Abitur there in the mid-1980s, then trained and qualified as a stonemason in an apprenticeship from 1984 to 1985. From 1991 to 1996 he studied fine art at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste Dresden, receiving his diploma in 1997 and continuing that year as a Meisterschuler under the painter Ralf Kerbach.

Havekost's paintings drew on photographs, television stills, and other found or self-shot images, which he cropped, digitally altered, and then rendered in flat, often blurred passages of acrylic, treating the surface of contemporary image culture as his primary subject. His exhibition history broadened through the 2000s, including a 2005 traveling presentation connected to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and a 2006 group presentation at Tate Modern in London. In 2010 the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf appointed him professor of painting, a position he held until his death, and the same year Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt mounted his solo exhibition Retina. Further solo museum and gallery exhibitions followed in Duisburg, Berlin, New York, Prague, and elsewhere through the 2010s.

Havekost died suddenly and unexpectedly on 5 July 2019 in Berlin, at the age of 51, as reported by his longtime gallerist Frank Lehmann and confirmed by Der Spiegel, Der Tagesspiegel, and multiple other major German outlets. Some contemporaneous press reports gave his age as 52; his birth and death dates as documented across gallery and museum sources place his age at death at 51. He was preparing the exhibition U Say Love at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, which the gallery later reopened as an in memoriam presentation.

Havekost's early reception in the United States tied him closely to the Richter-influenced photorealist tradition. Reviewing a 2005 presentation in the Los Angeles Times, critic David Pagel linked his work closely to Gerhard Richter's photorealist painting, suggesting Havekost had not yet fully established an independent voice. Writing in The New York Times the same year, critic Roberta Smith took a more favorable view, pointing to a productive tension between the directness of his painted surfaces and the randomness and distance of his source imagery. Later German coverage, following his death, tended to treat him as a mature and independent figure in his own right, a painter of contemporary surfaces and screens who had moved past comparisons to any single predecessor, and as an influential teacher through his Dusseldorf professorship.

Havekost's estate is represented by Anton Kern Gallery in New York, which continues to present his work, including a planned retrospective presentation timed to Art Basel in 2026. His paintings are held in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Stadel Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, the Rubell Museum, and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, giving his market strong institutional grounding.

Public auction activity for Havekost is comparatively thin and does not resolve to a single confirmed all-time record. Auction-house indices show a top documented result of about EUR 43,920 for the painting Back to the flag at Lempertz and a USD 40,000 result for an untitled 2000 painting at Phillips, but neither source provides a complete, dated sales history, so a definitive record cannot be established from currently available data. A museum retrospective planned for 2026 at Museum Kurhaus Kleve, alongside the Art Basel presentation, may generate fresh, better-documented sale activity.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Havekost, and verification of works currently rests with Anton Kern Gallery as estate representative and with the artist's longtime German dealers. Public auction data is sparse, and, based on currently available sources, no single sale can be confirmed as his definitive auction record, so collectors should treat any headline price figures with caution until they can be matched to a documented auction house, location, and date. His body of work is now fixed following his death in 2019, and his standing rests primarily on institutional collecting and museum programming, including a 2026 retrospective at Museum Kurhaus Kleve, rather than on a long or dense auction history.