Discipline: Frank Nitsche and Eberhardt Havekost
Discipline is exhibition of works by German contemporaries Frank Nitsche and Eberhardt Havekost.
Frank Nitsche is an avid traveller – the day the Berlin Wall fell he was on a train heading West. He informs his painting through an absorption of landscapes, cities, cultures, sub-cultures and pop cultures. He is an ardent collector whose famous ‘Atlas’ (a vast archive of photographic imagery) is stashed in his studio, alongside stacks and columns of used drink cans, rubber masks, more Halloween paraphernalia, Middle Eastern keepsakes and dysfunctional or distressed plastic toys – a pre-loved Bart Simpson and a Donald Duck (a fake, perhaps) to name just two. This studio flotsam of heterogeneous imagery and objects is digested and recycled into controlled, beautiful and often monumental paintings.
Nitsche’s forms are biomorphic, mobile and architectural, bringing to mind highway designs, circuitry and sports gear. Such forms are flat and fast and his palette a Disneyland collaboration with the sobriety and de-saturation of the former GDR. It’s easy to imagine Nitsche as a master calligrapher when you view his painting. His restrained curves and handling of materials echoes Giotto or Deibenkorn, and the futuristic architectures of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Oscar Niemeyer. Born in Görlitz, Eastern Germany, he now lives and works in Berlin.
Eberhardt Havekost is an artist interested in using the digitalized and multimedial visual language in his paintings and prints. His works take their genesis in photographic sources – shots from film and TV, images from magazines, along with his own photographs –and are modified and reworked into prints. His subjects range from anonymous buildings, architectural intereroiors and exteriors and modes of transport – trains, trailers, caravans, aeroplanes – among which portraits and figures sometimes appear.
Havecost trained alongside Nitsche, at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Dresden. This is the first time the pair will exhibit in New Zealand.