Patches
Richard Hawkins
Potentialities

For Richard Hawkins’s first exhibition in Austria, Kunsthalle Wien has produced four patches, each drawn from works shown in the exhibition: The Adored Absorbed appears in Or, Rather, the Adored’s Resistance to the Incorporating Undertow of the One Who Adores from the series Orphans (2017–2024). Hawkins’s selection of paintings is based upon the subject of ‘unrequited love, detachment and the troubles of romanticising a desiring subject.’

Anxious Love has been taken from Melancholy Bleat (2019). Subjects that might have been cut from magazines and pasted onto the painting in earlier bodies of work are here painted into dense, energetic compositions.

The frightened faces peeking out from behind bars and the barrel releasing thick dark smoke are part of Salome painting: Locked up and belongs to the Salome-paintings produced between 2011 and 2021.