NEW YORK.- The Whitney presents two decades of work by one of America’s most singular and inventive sculptors in Tim Hawkinson, the artist’s first major museum survey, opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art on February 11, 2005. The show, organized by the Whitney and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—where it will be seen after its New York presentation—follows Hawkinson’s steady evolution as seen in his meticulously detailed drawings, minute constructions, inflated latex casts, and uncanny mechanical contraptions.

“Tim Hawkinson’s fantastical works suggest the profound strangeness of life, matter, and time. Interweaving images of bodies and machines, at scales that vary from the monumental to the nearly microscopic, Hawkinson conjures a world that teeters on the cusp between the real and unreal,” remarks exhibition curator Lawrence Rinder, adjunct curator at the Whitney and dean of graduate studies at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. From his visually compelling miniature sculptures of birds and bird eggs entirely made from his own fingernail clippings, to his huge, sprawling mechanical wind instruments constructed of inflatable plastic tubes and ducts, Hawkinson’s oeuvre is a meditation on nature, machines, the body and human consciousness.