Richard Hawkins: Potentialities

The Kestner Gesellschaft is pleased to present Potentialities, a major survey of works by Richard Hawkins. Since the early 1990s, the Los Angeles–based artist has developed a singular practice centered nerdy research, the dynamics of fandom and desire, and on the intense pleasure of looking. Comprising more than 100 works across eight bodies of work, the exhibition offers the first major institutional overview of Hawkins’s oeuvre in more than a decade. Potentialities focuses on works produced over the past twenty years, spanning painting, sculpture, ceramic reliefs, and AI-generated videos that draw on online subcultures and shared memes.

The exhibition opens with a group of paintings made through processes of cutting and pasting imagery from magazines and publications (2017–24). These works bring together sources as diverse as Greek and Roman statuary, headshots of hair models, thirst traps, gay adult film stars, and Hollywood icons, establishing collage and the combination of diverse references as a foundational method.

A second body of work consists of colorful acrylic paintings (2019–24), in which painted portraits of celebrities are combined with fragments of painted text, alongside figures such as vampires and zombies, bullfighters, and shirtless posers. Here, the logic of the scrapbook is no longer based on cut-and-paste collage alone but is translated into painting itself, where fragments are constructed through overlaps and transparencies rather than physical assemblage. This painterly reconfiguration turns the scrapbook into an expanded method: an obsessive vernacular system capable of holding disparate material within a deliberately unstable order. Through this approach, genre, history, popular culture, gay subculture, and art are compressed into a dense, shifting field of references.

Other sections of Potentialities more explicitly develop Hawkins’s sustained engagement with the practices and obsessions of other artists. These include the Forrest Bess Variations—paintings and works on paper—which interpret the paintings and theories of the mid-century fisherman-painter Forrest Bess; a series analyzing the asylum drawings of French writer Antonin Artaud through ceramics (2012–23); collages based on the notebooks of Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of Ankoku Butoh (“dance of darkness”); and Death to Mike Kelley (2019), dedicated to his former teacher, the American artist Mike Kelley.

The exhibition closes with a series of recent paintings developed in homage to French painter Pierre Bonnard. Taking up Bonnard’s eccentric use of color, overlaps, and transparencies, Hawkins reworks his compositions, recasting groups of young beauties in lush environments filled with beef, blossoms, butterflies, and cats. In an interview, Hawkins reflects on this process: “I was intrigued by the looseness and clumsiness that Bonnard makes look so easy… getting lost in a fantasy of Bonnardness is my own kind of generative proliferation machine.”

The title Potentialities refers to the capacity for something—anything—to be or become otherwise: the possibilities of being and becoming are limitless. In Hawkins’s work, this idea operates as both concept and method. Across paintings, collages, and videos, images and subjects remain in flux, cut, layered, and recombined into open-ended constellations.

In short, desire and fandom emerge not as fixed themes but as an ongoing, non-teleological field—excessive and in constant formation—in which meaning is continuously produced through relations rather than fixed references. Collage, understood as the bringing together of disparate elements, structures Hawkins’s “promiscuously referential” works. It operates as a mode of “cruising” through imagery from popular culture, literature, and the annals of art history, driven by juxtaposition, chance, and intuitive association.

Richard Hawkins (b. 1961, lives in Los Angeles) has had solo exhibitions at institutions including Kunsthalle Wien (2025/26); LOEWE’s FW24 Men’s Show, Paris (2024); Tate Liverpool (2014); Le Consortium, Dijon (2013); the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (both 2010); de Appel, Amsterdam (2007); and Kunstverein Heilbronn (2003). He has also participated in numerous international group exhibitions, including Artists Space, New York (2023); Bonner Kunstverein (2019); Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2014); and the 2012 Whitney Biennial, New York. His work is held in major international collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Kistefos Museum, Norway; LOEWE Foundation, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nevada Museum of Art; Palm Springs Art Museum; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Hawkins is a Professor of painting at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena.

The exhibition in Hannover is curated by Eva Birkenstock in close collaboration with Kunsthalle Wien. It is accompanied by the publication Richard Hawkins: Potentialities, with texts by Rhea Anastas, Annie Ochmanek, and Kristian Vistrup Madsen; an interview with the artist by Bruce Hainley; and an introduction by Michelle Cotton and Eva Birkenstock. The book is published in German and English by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne (designed by Dan Solbach; 38 Euro).

Richard Hawkins has created a limited-edition print as part of a new series of artists’ editions. Mystery Cult of Harpocrates (Hannover Version) (2026) reproduces his 2018 painting of the same name, included in the exhibition.