Silk Scarf
Richard Hawkins

For Richard Hawkins’s first exhibition in Austria, Kunsthalle Wien has produced a limited edition silk scarf featuring his painting Nocturne (2023). The oil painting is part of a series in which portraits of actors, male models, pop stars, Youtubers and Instagram influencers appear alongside samplings of paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Odilon Redon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Charles Burchfield. Since the early 1990s, 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’, quoting from the histories of artistic representation in sculpture, painting, literature and the performing arts alongside popular culture.