Born 1961
Lives Los Angeles
Shinjuku Boy No. 6
2008
Collage
59x47cm
Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz
In Richard Hawkins’ languid collages from the 1990s Hollywood actors proposition male models and porn stars in homoerotic mises-en-scène. The ‘Disembodied Zombies’ (1997) series of inkjet prints mingles lurid fantasy with B-movie horror, controversially presenting portraits of idealized male icons bleeding profusely from their severed heads. In 1999 Hawkins turned his attention to painting, but he retained the same schizophrenically varied activity, producing everything from garish abstracts to figurative history paintings dealing with the plight of Native Americans or the function of hermaphrodite statuary in ancient Rome. Described by the artist as ‘hallucinations from a Viagra overdose’, these shrine-like works all explore the desire and decadence of fandom. (ST)
