Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce 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.”