VIENNA.- Kunsthalle Wien presents a major survey of works by Richard Hawkins (b. 1961, Mexia, Texas), bringing together over 100 paintings, collages, sculpture and videos from nine distinct bodies of work produced over the last three decades.

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.

The exhibition manifests distinct lines of obsessive enquiry that has encompassed subjects as diverse as Greek and Roman statuary and the headshots of Japanese male hair models. Hawkins’s fanatical approach makes reference to the often private activity of collating ephemera into scrapbooks. More recently, his video montages allude to online subcultures and shared memes. The exhibition surveys a period of production that begins with meticulously annotated compositions of cut and pasted imagery and leads on through ceramic reliefs and acrylic paintings to videos edited using artificial intelligence to generate what have been described as “queer exorcisms.” This exhibition also sees Hawkins enlarge and cannibalise images of his own works to produce wallpapers that allow him to layer and contrast different chapters of research.

An early series of paintings reinterpret the biblical story of Salome, a subject of paintings by Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi and Titian (among many others) as well as works for the stage by Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss. Hawkins retells it as a nightmarish fable of “homo-dystopia” set outside a funhouse-cum-bordello where severed heads haunt male prostitutes touting for business. Several other chapters of the exhibition draw upon Hawkins’s studies of the life and obsessions of different artists including the Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata, the French writer Antonin Artaud and the American painter Forrest Bess.

A more recent series of works render Hollywood celebrities in dense, colourful painted compositions. Hawkins combines candid paparazzi shots with portraits of actors in period costume, using an ostentatious collar or a gratuitous display of flesh to anchor their disembodied heads. Several demonstrate a close study of the late work of the French painter Pierre Bonnard, shifting between portraiture and still life compositions of tables laid with an abundance of fruit. Invoking Bonnard’s application of colour, Hawkins recasts a company of young men in fecund landscapes replete with clouds of blossom, cats and butterflies.

Potentialities is the first institutional exhibition of Hawkins's work in over a decade and the first in Austria. It is organised in cooperation with Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover where it will be presented from late April 2026.