Richard Hawkins
Potentialities

Kunsthalle Wien presents a major survey of works by Richard Hawkins (b. 1961, Mexia, Texas). Comprising over 100 works, it includes painting, collage, sculpture and video forming nine distinct bodies of work from the last twenty years. It is the first institutional exhibition of Hawkins’s work in over a decade and the first in Austria.

Over the last three decades Hawkins has developed a singular practice based upon the intense pleasure of looking and the dynamics of desire. Employing collage as a means to structure and develop his compositions, he has described his work as ‘promiscuously referential’ in quoting freely from popular culture within works that address subjects from the histories of artistic representation in sculpture, painting, literature and the performing arts (among others). This survey focuses on works produced between 2011 and 2025, many shown for the first time in an institutional context.