Edition
Richard Hawkins
Purple Melody Vienna

Richard Hawkins has produced a limited edition print in the context of his first institutional exhibition in Austria. Purple Melody Vienna (2025) reproduces a version of the 2018 painting Purple Melody, which is included in the exhibition.

In his essay for the exhibition catalogue, Kristian Vistrup Madsen describes the painting as ‘quasi-scientific’ in its ‘ordered grid’, drawing a comparison to ‘Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1927–29), one man’s attempt to create some sort of coherent world-view. Here is a map of the intersecting relations between the great marble head of Apollo, the majestic manes of guitarists, the particular masculine daintiness evident in some Japanese fashion photography and Arnold Böcklin’s Toteninsel (1883) – all in the same field of vision.’ Madsen describes a ‘melancholy’ in Hawkins’ ‘amassing’ of images: ‘Even at the point where the grid of images falters mid-way […] we recall the god of silence and secrecy and see in the rough application of purple colour only more flesh. Hawkins punishes the terrible angels by capturing them like flies in his spiderweb of colour, pinning their ephemerality onto a form, but he is also loving them by holding them in this way inside the architecture of his art.’

A framed edition is available on request for € 580.

Sales proceeds support Kunsthalle Wien’s programme.