Neal Baer Collection

Richard Hawkins (b. 1961, Mexia, Texas) has lived and worked in Los Angeles since the 1990s. His mixed media practice, with a focus on collage, expresses “very agitated, sometimes embarrassingly personal and presumably cathartic exegesis of male desire.” (Susan Kandel, LA Times, 1995). Brig #5: Cumpire comes from of a series of works exhibited at Greene Naftali in 2012 in which candy-colored interiors painted on wood have been inserted into a painted canvas framed of trompe l’oeil riveted steampunk panels reminiscent of the freight trucks that would populate the landscape of Hawkins’ childhood growing up next to a Texan interstate highway. “The trappings of the paintings are otherwise scant and ghastly; a few smoking trashbarrels, woebegone zombies lurching past hollowed-out gloryholes evoke, overall, the strange haunted sexclubs and adult-only thrill ride worlds that often populate Hawkins’ oeuvre.”  (Press release, Greene Naftali, 2012)

Addressing a variety of subjects – including ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, 19th century French decadent painting and literature, 1980s teen heartthrobs, and the intricacies of Thai sex tourism – his work is, at its core, about the pleasure of intense looking. Hawkins is an equal-opportunity voyeur, but it is the male figure – often young, beautiful, and exotic – that is the primary inspiration for and subject for his art. What seems on the surface to be one man’s obsession with objects of desire is indeed a form of obsession, but with objects as such – the tangible, tactile, bodily stuff of life in all its sexy, scary, gorgeous imperfection.

– Lisa Dorin in Richard Hawkins: Third Mind (Art Institute of Chicago, 2010) produced on occasion of Hawkins exhibition there from 22 October 2010 – 16 January 2011.

Provenance
Greene Naftali Gallery

Exhibitions
“Richard Hawkins,” Greene Naftali, New York, 18 October – 24 November 2012

Other works by Richard Hawkins
After Artaud: The Sexual Awkwardness of God, Sperm Traps (2019)

See also
Richard Hawkins in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago

Richard Hawkins in the collection of the Hammer Museum

Richard Hawkins in the collection of the MoMA

Richard Hawkins in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art

Richard Hawkins at Gallery Buchholz

Richard Hawkins at Greene Naftali

“Richard Hawkins: Third Mind,” at the Art Institute of Chicago, 21 October 2010 – 15 January 2011 and at the Hammer Museum, 12 February – 22 May 2011

“Richard Hawkins: New Work” at Jenny’s, Los Angeles, 24 October – 12 December 2015

Richard Hawkins at Richard Telles, Los Angeles, 18 May – 22 June 2013

Richard Hawkins at Richard Telles, Los Angeles, 15 May – 19 June, 2010