Frank Nitsche // Eberhard Havekost
DISCIPLINE
16 November - 8 December 2007
Supporting text, German Virtues written by Leonhard Emmerling
Since the early 1990’s German painting and photography have enjoyed widespread international attention. More recently, a number of artists emanating from the prominent cultural centres of Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden have, like their British contemporaries (the YBA's) been labelled the ‘Young German Artists’, their work inspiring a global media frenzy channelled by fervent activity on the international art market. Graduates of the Academy of Visual Arts in Dresden (Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste), Frank Nitsche (b.1964 Görlitz) and Eberhard Havekost (b.1967 Dresden) belong to this burgeoning fellowship and both are currently considered among the most important practitioners of contemporary German art to emerge of their generation. Gow Langsford Gallery is extremely privileged to host their inaugural New Zealand exhibition entitled DISCIPLINE, featuring photographic lithographs by Havekost and current painting by Nitsche.
Eberhard Havekost has staged numerous international shows throughout Europe and the United States. He continues to exhibit widely with works that often adopt the aesthetic of Germany’s modernist architecture as a means to explore the disintegration of the country’s utopian ideals. Utilising the photographic image as filter, Havekost deconstructs and then reinvents the ‘ideal’ image. Photographs are manipulated by computer, colours are enhanced and form and perspective flattened, blurred and distorted to improve their aesthetic appeal. Representation is then re-presented via paint, further distancing the subject from reality. His subject matter extends to stark modernist buildings, car wrecks and dilapidated structures that litter the city of Dresden and which are uniformly transformed by Havekost’s neo-romantic vision. His style is distinguished by a sophisticated treatment of surface and an impeccable graphic precision that while capturing simple beauty in the mundane and the banal affects in the viewer a profound sense of alienation and melancholy. Havekost’s transformative process incorporates photo off-set lithographic prints, a selection of which will feature in DISCIPLINE.
Frank Nitsche draws from a rich catalogue of sources extracted from our 21st century technological landscape. He combines references from computer aided imagery, architecture, graphic design, commercial advertising and digital photography to produce remarkably complex and alluring paintings. Images are manually processed and synthesized through the customary practice of oil on canvas. Nitsche has developed a distinctive palette of subdued analogous tones often punctuated by the jarring presence of a contrasting hue. The colours are meticulously organised within a maze of graphic tangents, curves and arabesques which collide and mutate, imitating the random trajectory of a computer cursor’s journey across a screen. As well the picture’s surface is skilfully dissected and fractured with a seemingly endless network of overlapping planes and intersections built up in layers and sanded away like repressed memories attempting to resurface. A sublime tension exists between Nitsche’s carefully calculated delineation and the spontaneity of drips and ghostly slippages that announce the painting’s objectivity and declare the artist’s physicality.
Eberhard Havekost was recently the subject of a retrospective sourced from the Rubell Family Collection and held at the Art Gallery of Florida Gulf Coast University and the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida. His work is included in numerous international collections including MoMA (New York), Tate Modern (London), Los Angeles MoCA and the Saatchi Collection (London). The artist currently lives and works between Dresden and Berlin, Germany. Frank Nitsche lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He is represented in collections throughout Europe and the US including the Museum of Modern Art Georges Pompidou (Paris), Tate Modern (London) and the Fondation Musée d’Art Moderne Grand Duc Jean (Luxembourg).
Frank Nitsche will be present at the opening reception of DISCIPLINE.
German Virtues
If only they existed, and if only the mere thought of them was not enough to make your hair stand on end.
Hair precisely parted, highly polished boots, Beethoven’s music playing while people of inferior quality get shot, perfect logistics, and meticulous record-keeping of all those who were murdered.
Soldiers’ honour and warriors’ virtue = 60 million dead.
Efficiency and diligence, punctuality and order - the usual idiotic stereotypes.
36 Euros hourly wage for people who mostly punch tickets and go on strike when their demands for a 31 % pay increase are not met straight away. After all, only this would allow them to pay for owning a home, a vacation on Tenerife and their second car. Meanwhile the surplus is generated in low-wage countries. At the same time, all those who do not have the privilege of being employed go on the dole at the nearest German “Employment Agency”, registering their claim to the legally guaranteed subsistence minimum.
Yet another stereotype.
Just like the Volkswagen - high-class prostitutes - sex parties for members of the company's workers' council.
Enough said about the proletariat.
Poets and thinkers.
Texts without a single grammatically correct sentence.
The only thing you can rely on is the Inland Revenue Department and their tax assessments. Profundity.
People who babble on television about the little bells attached to their genital areas or even much worse.
Observe an almost British loss of inhibitions under the influence of alcohol whilst staying on the Mediterranean islands, contrasted with the accurately measured anal sadism practiced at home.
Immigrant workers were welcome, but it did not occur to anyone to think about integration.
“Multikulti“ - the usual exaggerated compensation attempt resulting from bad conscience. Candlelight vigils will do, while asylum seekers’ hostels are burning.
The disgusting hypocrisy of the left, who succeeded in finding their way into all institutions. Still harping on, voicing their social criticism, they are reaping their pension entitlements. Institutionalised social criticism on professors’ salaries.
“Leitkultur”.
“Secondary virtues“ - the ingenious neologism of a perfidious opportunist who pretends to be an upright socialist while stashing away the dirty Euros of a right-wing gutter press paper, and who appears as the boisterous voice of the New Left.
The moral shortfall of a heavyweight long-standing skandalon, who during his 16 years in office with government responsibility could not care less about the 10 % long-term unemployment rate, and who knew no shame when it came to covering up his own corruptness with his promise as a man of honour that served as a fig leaf when facing those bigwigs who helped him with their dosh on his way to the Chancellor’s office.
It is all history’s window of opportunity for someone who was born late.
Just like reunification: The necessary implosion (FINALLY!) of a morbid unjust state; its incorporation, usurpation, and colonisation on wrong terms; the preciousness in victory of a new Western power; the extinction of the past. The Palast der Republik [East Germany's former parliament building] - Damnatio Memoriae. The pig-like behaviour of entire legions of greedy gold diggers, gutting the East that was first evaluated by an army of meticulous bureaucrats and then wound up to death.
“Leitkultur”. Swinger parties.
Havekost’s shopping-malls located in the wasteland of an ethical, political and cultural landscape. In the restrained colorism of Nitsche's ornament you can find the reflection of German appreciation for modesty and of the refusal of any commitment. The stereotype of profundity suggesting density through avoidance of definite articles preceding nouns.
There is something to it.
Text by Leonhard Emmerling, November 2007
Translated from the German by Friederike Cichon.