Over three decades, Richard Hawkins has developed a body of work that turns on the erotics of visibility, fueled by what he calls “a combination of historical research and boyish obsessions.” Collage—the commingling of unlike terms—is the guiding principle of his practice, which spans painting, video, glazed ceramic, scrapbooks, zines, sculpture, and more. Maximalist in its aesthetic and roving in its tastes, Hawkins’s work follows his own particular lines of fascination. Artistic touchstones tend toward cult figures like Forrest Bess or Antonin Artaud, and recurring subjects include Greek sculpture, butoh dance-theater, OnlyFans, and celebrity crushes. For Richard Meyer, the results are a brisk blend of “avant-garde, kitsch, and kink”—one that “challenges us to rethink our hierarchies of value and visual pleasure.”

Hawkins was raised in rural Texas and educated at CalArts, coming up under mentors such as Mike Kelley and Dennis Cooper in the 1980s and ’90s, when the AIDS crisis laced sensuality with an undercurrent of risk. With a knowing hedonism, Hawkins uses collage tactics of accretion and layering to tap the complex workings of desire. As Lisa Dorin wrote in the catalog that accompanied his mid-career retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, he broaches the “tangible, tactile, bodily stuff of life in all its sexy, scary, gorgeous imperfection.” Hawkins opens a portal—for himself and for us—to the psychic space of fandom’s thrall, where Justin Bieber stalks the violet landscapes of Pierre Bonnard. And recently, the pop icons of his artworks have embraced him in return, through collaborations with the likes of JW Anderson for the Loewe men's collection in 2024. In Hawkins’s hands, mass media can be a conduit for "expressing difference within culture and fantasies beyond culture.”