The California artist Tim Hawkinson is renowned for transforming everyday materials into objects that are as uncanny as they are poetic. Through virtuoso craftsmanship and the use of peculiar materials and drastic shifts in scale, he unsettles our expectations and startles us into perceiving the world anew. This exhibition of 30 tiny paintings — yes, paintings — made between 2021 and 2023 is utterly unlike — yet completely consistent with — the expansive body of work he has created over the last 35 years.
On wooden panels about the size of a paperback novel, Hawkinson recounts fleeting moments from his family’s life. They’re hyperreal images based on iPhone photos he, his wife (the artist Patty Wickman), or their daughter have taken. A few are posed; most are candid.
He depicts his aged father trimming his toenails, his wife reading in bed, his daughter asleep in the backseat of the car after a college tour, and several unflattering selfies in a bathroom mirror. We watch as his father moves toward death and his daughter becomes an adult. There’s a can’t-look-away-ness to many of these pictures, a relentless, cringey intimacy that’s both frightening and tender.
Hawkinson is famous for work that refers to, is cast from, or is composed of bits — like nail clippings or hair — of his own body. In this work, he adds the bodies of his father and daughter — extensions of himself into the future and back into the past. He reveals his joy in the domestic, his bewilderment at empty-nesting, and the shock of watching himself age. In his most personal work yet, Hawkinson describes ordinary moments in one family’s life, and so doing, expresses our common humanity.
Tim Hawkinson was born in San Francisco in 1960 and received his BFA from San Jose State University before moving to the Los Angeles area (MFA 1989, University of California, Los Angeles), where he is currently based. Hawkinson's work has been exhibited internationally with solo museum shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., among others. His work is in numerous collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art; San Jose Museum of Art, California; J. Paul Getty Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
