Published 27 AUG 2024

13 SEP until 12 OCT 2024

Galerie Buchholz is proud to announce the 12th solo-exhibition of Richard Hawkins. For this occasion, the artist will present a survey of his work at our Berlin gallery beginning with his earliest polaroid collages from the late eighties, to his iconic inkjet prints depicting the severed heads of male models from the mid-nineties, to the last, largest of his haunted house sculptures from 2010, along with a group of his newest videos shown here for the first time.

“Hawkins’s 1988 MFA thesis show demonstrated a synthesis of the methodologies he had picked up at CalArts and foreshadowed many of the themes that would eventually find their way into his mature work. [It] stemmed from the fact that Franz Kafka and Tom Cruise share a birthday [and] featured an enlarged, 8-by-8-foot reproduction of a drawing by Kafka of a man with his head on his desk, which Hawkins painted directly on one of the walls. On either side of the painting, he affixed […] grids of Polaroid photographs of Cruise – including scenes of him dancing in his underwear in the 1983 movie Risky Business-shot directly from the television screen as they played on VHS tape.”¹

“The Last House has a window through which one can literally read the writing on the wall, a hand-scrawled meditation including the words, ‘hopeless, impossible, never. Never ever, never again.’ No matter how decorative, how beautiful, or how (as in the case of The Last House) theatrical a work by Hawkins can appear, there is always something deeper, something more, lurking inside, behind, beneath, and beyond. The work’s title nods to Wes Craven’s 1972 hardcore horror film and its 2009 remake, The Last House on the Left. The largest and most structurally impressive of the altered dollhouses – with its top-heavy widow’s walk, bricked-in windows, and stairways and balconies seemingly on the verge of collapse – it is a feat of craftsmanship. The artist has compared the process of building the sculpture to collage, in that it was ‘formed, taken apart, put back together, hacked into, shored up inside, then decorated obsessively over about two years.’ But, he continued, ‘that’s also how I make paintings.’”²

Richard Hawkins (1961, Mexia, Texas) lives and works in Los Angeles where he was recently Visiting Professor of Painting & Drawing at University of California, Los Angeles. His work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; The Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London, among others.

For Loewe’s current Fall/Winter 2024 menswear collection, Richard Hawkins’s work was the inspiration for the designer J.W. Anderson, with elements from Hawkins’s paintings appearing as prints, jacquard knits, beaded textiles, and on leather accessories. This imagery stems from the body of work that Hawkins presented in his last solo exhibition at Galerie Buchholz Berlin. Concurrent with Hawkins’s new exhibition, Loewe will present a selection from this fashion collection in our storefront gallery space at Fasanenstraße 31.

¹&² Dorin, Lisa, in: Richard Hawkins: Third Mind, Art Institute of Chicago, 2010, pp. 13, 26 (exhibition catalogue)