Wrath of the Underworld

‘[Richard Hawkins’] paintings are history paintings with dense narratives alluding to the corruption of the old West. The figures’ caricature-like outlines and the works’ pastel and candy colours belie the bleakness of their content: burial mounds, swamps full of wine bottles, stumps instead of trees, a lone cottage and isolated, skeletal humans, both Native Americans and white pioneers, seemingly wracked by melancholy, hunger and substance abuse. Some titles, such as Wrath of the Underworld (2004), invoke a general phenomenon driving the narrative… As an ongoing project of self-analysis, Hawkins’ art practice is also a critical case study of society and culture – it understands the self as the confluence of, as well as the rebellion against, conservative social forces’ (A. Farquharson, quoted in, A. Farquharson, ‘Different Strokes’, in frieze, issue 97, March 2006, reproduced at http:/www.frieze.com/issue/article/different_strokes_1/).