link to Richard Hawkins at Galerie Buchholz Cologne 2016

With “Being and its Fetuses: New Ceramics” we are happy to announce the 8th solo exhibition by Richard Hawkins (*1961, lives in Los Angeles) at Galerie Buchholz.

In a previous comprehensive body of work, Richard Hawkins used the scrapbooks of the legendary Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata (1928 – 1986) as the point of departure for his collages. Hijikata is known as one of the founders of Butoh dance. In his extensive personal notebooks he wrote about the development of his choreographies and illustrated these notations with images of Western modern art to further articulate the repertoire of gestures he envisioned for Butoh dance. Through this practice, Hijikata produced a subjective and very personal art history in which he addressed the paintings of Western modernism primarily on the basis of their physical and psychological potentials for expression.

For his new body of work, Richard Hawkins takes as his subject Antonin Artaud, with the title “Being and its Fetuses” borrowed from the title of a 1945 Artaud drawing. The French artist, actor, theater director, and writer Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) is a central figure in the European avant-garde and, as Hijikata did for Japanese dance, Artaud famously revolutionized European theater along with theoretical writing on performance. His work was groundbreaking for the development of modern theater. Although it has been the subject of institutional exhibitions, in comparison Artaud’s drawing oeuvre was primarily seen as rather inaccessible, and received much less theoretical recognition than his writings and theatrical work.

When Richard Hawkins began his recent research for his new work, he noted that there are still very few attempts in art historical literature to approach the iconography of Artaud’s drawings. Richard Hawkins’ new ceramic assemblages came into being through intimately looking at Artaud’s drawings, and particularly the drawings from the time period between 1944-1946. In these years, Artaud was a patient at a psychiatric hospital in Rodez. The body of drawings by Artaud from that time contains an elaborate and complex iconography featuring many recurring, nearly hieroglyphic elements and forms. Reading Artaud’s correspondence from the psychiatric hospital (published posthumously in his notorious “Letters from Rodez”) one can understand that these drawings were made expressly for circulation, that Artaud saw them as an accomplished expression of his artistic work, and that he imagined, through the help of friends, to sell these as art works.

For this exhibition, Richard Hawkins has approached these drawings through the physical, manual re-molding or re-forming in clay of Artaud’s iconography to gain a point of entry into and understanding about Artaud’s formal vocabulary. The muddy, morphological quality of the ceramic material itself, and the tactile sensory perception of this formal language, might not be an insignificant part of the process.