Eberhard Havekost - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 17, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, Dresden

  • Literature

    M. Holborn and F. Huber, The Triumph of Painting, London, 2005, p. 353 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Vertiginous and fiercely cropped, Eberhard Havekost’s Kontakt reads as taut with the freight of its symbolism, the allotted canvas actually failing to contain the plus-sized reality of its subjects. Although executed prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it is unlikely that contemporary viewers will escape a connection—thematically as well as visually—to the journalistic and sentimental imagery that flooded the United States after those events. The buildings are rendered as flat, surface without depth, with the only indication of shadow in the image serving to slightly dim the stars and backward curl of the flag, arguably drawing more attention to them than the flag itself, boldly outlined in black. This decision on Havekost’s part seems particularly prescient, as it is a simplified graphic image of the ‘stars and bars’ at attention before a towering skyscraper—while pruned entirely of context for anyone not familiar with 9/11’s events—that has arrived as a new unassailable image in the national mindset, much like Joseph Rosenthal’s 1947 photograph at Iwo Jima, which would serve as the model for Felix W. de Weldon’s Marine Corps Memorial in Washington, D.C.

71

Kontakt (Contact)

1998
Oil on canvas.
71 x 50 3/4 in. (180.3 x 128.9 cm).
Signed, titled and dated “KONTAKT Havekost 1998” on the reverse.

Estimate
$80,000 - 120,000 

Sold for $90,000

Contemporary Art Part I

17 May 2007
7pm New York