NEW YORK, NY.- Miles McEnery Gallery opened an exhibition of new paintings by Tim Hawkinson, on view 8 May through 21 June 2025. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated digital publication featuring an essay by Gary Brewer.

Over the course of a highly distinguished career spanning more than four decades, Tim Hawkinson has used his sculptural practice to explore the body, exposing it as an unreliable narrator, subject to its own biases and fallibility, shaped by external forces as much by its own autonomous internal logic. Now, in an exciting new body of work, Hawkinson brings this inquiry into the realm of painting, exploring the intersection of the body, memory, and our shared human experiences.

Titled Cabinet Pictures, this suite of diminutive paintings (often smaller than a piece of paper) was developed over several years as a deeply personal recounting of the artist’s life, which subvert the historied tradition of portraiture by eschewing polished glamor or idealization—Hawkinson’s subjects remain grounded in the unvarnished reality of personal experience. The scale of the paintings draws viewers in, inviting them physically closer to inspect minute details—photographs in a diner, street signs, even the manufacturer’s logo of a distant car. Here, the sharp accuracy of light and shadow becomes apparent, with each subject rendered in almost hyperrealistic detail. Though, Hawkinson still maintains a subtle suspicion of the body, using perspective to subtly warp his subjects, such that their faces and limbs hover on the edge of distortion. In the process, he creates an uncanny tension that draws the eye deeper, encouraging further exploration until the moment of unease settles.

For Hawkinson, these works came from a period of inward reflection, favoring intimacy over the grandeur of scale that his sculptural practice is often known for. In the artist’s words, “it was a way of disengaging, to work on things that did not connect to ideas that are current in the larger art world.” Though, amid the alienation fostered by the digital age, political divides, and a culture that values data over individualism, these paintings are perhaps now more relevant and necessary than ever—they invite empathy and connection, slowing us down to remember and linger in the messy complexities of the human experience. As Gary Brewer notes, “He elevates and transforms snapshots of personal intimacies into exquisite paintings, captured for us to see as if in a cabinet of wonders. These fleeting memories are now fixed in a medium whose poetic resonance gives them a life as metaphors, poems that are a record of the most wonderful thing of all, love, family and friendships.”

Tim Hawkinson (b. 1960 in San Francisco, CA) received his Bachelor of Arts from San Jose State University in 1984 and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1989. In 2005, The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA) exhibited a major solo retrospective of Hawkinson’s early to mid-career works.

In 2015, he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Fine Arts.

Hawkinson has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; Arnoff Center for the Arts, Cincinnati, OH; Center for the Arts, Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco, CA; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

His work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous institutions including the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Malibu, CA; MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; Museé des beaux-arts de Montréal, Montréal, Canada; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; MuseumsQuartier Wien, Vienna, Austria; National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; San Jose Museum of Modern Art, San Jose, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Sky Art Museum, Seoul, Korea; and he was included in the 48th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy.

Hawkinson’s work may be found in the collections of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; The Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA; Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Tim Hawkinson lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.