Exhibition

RICHARD HAWKINS
New Paintings

8th Floor

Richard Hawkins’s solo exhibition—his eighth at Greene Naftali—follows desire where it leads, in twin pursuit of art historical fandom and the lure of the celebrity crush. The new paintings on view pay tribute to the work of Pierre Bonnard, as Hawkins filters the late Impressionist’s touch through his own hand and boy-crazy obsessions. The new works channel Bonnard’s caressing eye and the reckless hedonism of his color; the encrusted dazzle of the painted surface that makes rapture its own reward. Hawkins takes Bonnard interiors and landscapes as prompts to loosen those genres from their genteel moorings, studding his lush, dappled gardens with floating faces of pretty young men.

Richard Hawkins

3 Jacks for Autumn, 2025

Oil on canvas in artist's frame

75 1/2 x 70 1/2 inches (192 x 179 cm)

Richard Hawkins, 3 Jacks for Autumn, 2025 (detail)

Richard Hawkins, installation view, New Paintings, Greene Naftali, New York, 2025

Richard Hawkins

Fruits on a Scarlet Lake and Vermilion Tablecloth (after Bonnard), 2025

Oil on canvas in artist's frame

51 x 49 inches (130 x 125 cm)

Richard Hawkins, Fruits on a Scarlet Lake and Vermilion Tablecloth (after Bonnard), 2025 (detail)

Richard Hawkins, installation view, New Paintings, Greene Naftali, New York, 2025

Richard Hawkins

All Hands on D*ck, 2025

Oil on canvas in artist's frame

70 1/2 x 76 1/2 inches (179 x 194 cm)

Richard Hawkins, All Hands on D*ck, 2025 (detail)

“Pleasure—undiluted essence of pleasure—is a suspect commodity in modern art,” John Ashbery wrote of Bonnard’s bruised reputation, for coming too late and being too decorative. Bonnard made his vibratory pictures well into the 1940s, and was faulted for embracing mere ornament against the yardstick of Cubism’s rigor or abstraction’s reserve. Hawkins, for his part, slyly perverts what was latent in his sources: ripe produce splayed on Bonnard’s tabletops are rechristened Fruits; an all-male boating party from 1924 becomes the backdrop for All Hands on D*ck. That maritime scene is overlaid with enlarged heads pulled from Hawkins’s personal pantheon: Mike Faist hovers over the sail like an aegis, his bared nipples colored with an ardent realism, resting atop a field of white dabs laid on with a palette knife, like a Ryman.

Richard Hawkins, installation view, New Paintings, Greene Naftali, New York, 2025

Richard Hawkins

Dandy Floriculturists, 2025

Oil on canvas in artist's frame

75 1/2 x 70 3/4 inches (192 x 180 cm)

Richard Hawkins, Dandy Floriculturists, 2025 (detail)

Richard Hawkins, installation view, New Paintings, Greene Naftali, New York, 2025

Richard Hawkins

Fruits with a Finished Plate of Fish (after Bonnard), 2025

Oil on canvas in artist's frame

49 x 51 inches (125 x 130 cm)

Richard Hawkins, Fruits with a Finished Plate of Fish (after Bonnard), 2025 (detail)

Richard Hawkins, installation view, New Paintings, Greene Naftali, New York, 2025

Richard Hawkins
"That one night all those cute guys showed up...", 2025
Oil on canvas in artist's frame
70 1/2 x 76 1/2 inches (179 x 194 cm)

Richard Hawkins, "That one night all those cute guys showed up...", 2025 (detail)

Hawkins refers to such passages in his paintings as “captivation traps”—bits of heightened detail amidst the laxer brushwork that snare the viewer’s attention. Throughout, he draws energy from the distortions and oddities baked into the Bonnard originals: the skewed sightlines that intensify a theater of objects, the figures and edges left unresolved. Each kink pastoral or still life is a “faulty, poetic translation,” as Hawkins puts it, taking liberties (swapping hues and shifting perspectives) that feel sanctioned by Bonnard’s example. These new paintings thus belong to what TJ Clark calls “the Bonnard strand” of modernism, one that depends on revelry and heedless formal invention as tonic for dark times—an art “dedicated to the proposition that the only hope, in a corrupt and invasive culture, is to put one’s trust in the realm of the senses, and expose oneself—naively, almost idiotically—to the play of light.”

Richard Hawkins, installation view, New Paintings, Greene Naftali, New York, 2025

Richard Hawkins

Fruits with Cadmium Yellow Teapot (after Bonnard), 2025

Oil on canvas in artist's frame

51 x 49 inches (130 x 125 cm)

Richard Hawkins, Fruits with Cadmium Yellow Teapot (after Bonnard), 2025 (detail)

Richard Hawkins

The Exalted Origins of Unmanly Mannerism, 2025

Oil on canvas in artist's frame

70 3/8 x 76 5/8 inches (179 x 195 cm)

Richard Hawkins, The Exalted Origins of Unmanly Mannerism, 2025 (detail)

Richard Hawkins, installation view, New Paintings, Greene Naftali, New York, 2025

Richard Hawkins

Fruits in Mars Black shadow (after Bonnard), 2025

Oil on canvas in artist's frame

49 1/4 x 51 1/4 inches (125 x 130 cm)

Richard Hawkins, Fruits in Mars Black shadow (after Bonnard), 2025

Richard Hawkins, installation view, New Paintings, Greene Naftali, New York, 2025

Press Release

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