Blum & Poe is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition of new work by Tim Hawkinson.

Tim Hawkinson’s practice is known for its sprawling, surrealistic self-portraiture in which the body, through intense introspection, becomes an alien landscape open to radical redefinition and transformation. This artistic agenda is mirrored materially by Hawkinson’s use of familiar and ubiquitous consumer packaging and household objects in highly unconventional ways. The new work continues these refrains, while also exploring more pointedly, temporality, mortality, and the cyclic.

Hawkinson works in a wide array of media involving sculpture, painting, photography, and installation. The exhibition reflects this range, with such pieces as Orrery, a towering eight-foot tall sculpture of a woman at a spinning wheel atop a platform of rotating concentric circle tire treads. This piece looks to mechanical models used to illustrate the motions of the planets and their moons in our solar system. A sculptural collage of water bottles, plastic shopping bags, recouped hardware, and odds and ends comprise the woman’s head, hands, eyes, ears, and spindle; every part of the piece is interconnected and eternally spinning. Even the pattern of her dress creates the illusion of motion with its “Rotating Snakes” pattern designed by Kitaoka Akiyoshi. Wheels upon wheels, this hyperkinetic sculpture resembles a Whirling Dervish, a hypnotic mystical dancer forever circling and cycling between the material world and the cosmic.

A companion sculpture, Candle, takes the form of a giant foam candle, nearly eight feet tall. The dramatic scale propels this domestic object into a caustic landscape and volcanic totem. A central wick appears to erupt in flames, sending a cascade of Hawkinson’s cast heels and toes down the side in a revolving wax waterfall. A small door on the side of the candle reveals a chamber lined with an emergency blanket that bathes the handcrafted motor in an orange glow, evoking Earth’s fiery recycling processes. The burning candle also references 17th century vanitas paintings and their reflection on mortality.

In a large collage, Bike, Hawkinson assembles self-portrait photos printed in the negative to build a fleshy and precarious motorcycle. Hawkinson is suspended across an empty backdrop, his body reconfigured such that arms and legs become handles and spokes, and fingers, braided and multiplied, become tires. Eerie structural correspondences and analogous traits between the body’s composition, its locomotion, its internal cycles, and mass-produced two-wheeled motor vehicles give way to a sense of the “self” as “other”, a subject that is explored throughout Hawkinson’s practice.

Tim Hawkinson has exhibited widely internationally since 1981. He has been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions, a selection of which includes: Tim Hawkinson: Mapping the Marvelous, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2007-2008); Zoopsia: New Works by Tim Hawkinson, The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2007); Tim Hawkinson, Whitney Museum, New York, NY and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (2005); Directions: Tim Hawkinson, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2001); and Überorgan, Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA (2000-2001).

Hawkinson’s work can be found in several public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum, New York. In 2002, The Stuart Collection commissioned a 24-foot, sculpture constructed from eight granite boulders forming a teddy bear. Bear is permanently on view on the campus of the University of California, San Diego.

Tim Hawkinson received his M.F.A. from UCLA and lives and works in Los Angeles.