b. 1961, Mexia, Texas, USA; Lives and works Los Angeles, U.S

Over the past three decades, Richard Hawkins has built a practice rooted in the erotics of visibility, driven by a distinctive mix of historical inquiry and obsessive fascination. Embracing collage as both method and metaphor, his work cuts across media—painting, video, ceramics, zines, sculpture, and more—uniting disparate cultural fragments into densely layered compositions. Hawkins draws from a wide-ranging set of influences, merging high and low, avant-garde and pop. His artistic world includes references to Greek statuary, butoh performance, outsider artists, internet subcultures, and celebrity figures. The result is a maximalist, often irreverent visual language that blurs boundaries between the personal and the collective, desire and critique. Hawkins came of age artistically during the height of the AIDS crisis, an experience that informs his nuanced approach to beauty, sexuality, and risk. His collage-like sensibility reflects a belief in cultural hybridity, using repetition and accumulation to explore how identities are constructed and mediated. Whether channelling the intensity of fandom or subverting mainstream images, Hawkins’s work opens up into the emotional and psychic charge of contemporary life.

Recent solo exhibitions include Richard Hawkins: The House of Saturn and Venus, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin (2025); Richard Hawkins: Glimmerings of Pederastic Futurism, Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris (2024); Richard Hawkins: Disembodied Archetypes, The Contemporary Austin, Austin (2023); Richard Hawkins: Third Mind Index, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2022); Richard Hawkins: Hijikata Twist, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2021); Richard Hawkins: Toward a Mannerist Perversion, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2020). Recent group exhibitions include Believers: Artists and the Shakers, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2025); Bodies and Souls, Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris (2025); Dance with Daemons, Fondation Beyeler, Basel/Riehen, Switzerland (2024); The Endless Exhibition, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2023); No Humans Involved, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Being In the World, The Tenth Anniversary of the Long Museum, Long Museum, Shanghai (2022); Crip Time, MMK – Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2021); Made in L.A. 2020: a version, The Huntington and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2020); Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011, MoMA PS1, New York (2019).

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