The appeal of the ‘internet boyfriend’: Richard Hawkins in Vienna

Richard Hawkins operates as a fan, information he offers during a walkthrough of his latest show – ‘Potentialities’ at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna – providing a window into a practice that has long engaged with the pleasure of looking and the dynamics of desire, often in tandem with pop culture, frequently concentrated on the heartthrob. Preoccupied with Teen Beat magazine in his adolescence, most recently the American artist has found subjects in so-called internet boyfriends: actors Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor appear in his 2025 works All Hands on D*ck and Dandy Floriculturists, respectively, while Adam Driver’s likeness features in Softly yet Weirdly Ways (2020). Justin Bieber, Timothée Chalamet and Jack O’Connell are other recent protagonists, and each is present in some form in Vienna.

‘There’s an impulse that's probably inexplicable at first, this area of fascination, then I start reading everything I can, wondering if those initial impulses are explained,’ says Hawkins, reflecting on the obsessive enquiries that shape his work. ‘Part of it's not knowing – once I’ve realised what the attraction is, if it can be figured out, it becomes less of a mystery. Keeping it open and spectral even, is part of the fun.’

Part of a larger group of works on canvas (‘They've never been all together,’ notes the artist, ‘so that was a kind of dream’), the paintings are brightly coloured, some with lines of poetry woven around the figures (usually depicted only from the shoulders up), many with marks that from afar (or as seen on a screen) read almost as felt tip pen, a playful aesthetic that speaks to the young Hawkins whose curiosity was confined to periodicals. Today, he is invariably online – a proponent of AI, whose research embraces OnlyFans as much as TikTok or YouTube.

Continuing through 6 April 2026, before moving to Hannover’s Kestner Gesellschaft, ‘Potentialities’ is Hawkins’ first institutional show in over a decade (and his most substantial to date), and is comprised of more than 100 pieces made between 2011 and 2025, grouped into nine distinct bodies of work. As well as paintings, several of the artist’s collages, for which he is perhaps best known and which tend to guide his wider engagement with areas of personal interest, also feature, while sculpture and video are represented too; the last bookends the show, with Cheerful and Scary film compilations, made between 2023 and 2025, hosted in rooms at either end of the space.

Stretching his interpretation of and ongoing study into fandom and obsession are three bodies of work, made between 2012 and 2025, that directly reference other creative figures. Physically positioned nearby one another but with visually contrasting attributes, works about the Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata, the French writer Antonin Artaud, and the American painter Forest Bess showcase this other thread, in which Hawkins reconsiders their narratives. ‘I'm trying to recreate things, or re-manifest the intent of the original,’ he explains, alluding to his reinterpretations, like the Ankoku collages from 2012, which riff on the choreographer’s own scrapbooks (the Bess works, moreover, which saw him cross-reference Bess’ own lexicon of symbols and colour codes with archives of surviving correspondence, are simply titled The Forrest Bess Variations). ‘I always consider these collaborations,’ he continues. ‘Maybe not Artaud, he was a bit more difficult.’

For all the garishness accounted for in the space, there is an overwhelming understanding of the darkness that underpins it (prior to Teen Beat, Hawkins would fill scrapbooks with images of Dracula and Frankenstein from monster magazines, he says, ‘early self-identifications or something, probably cries for help’). One avenue for this here is a series of wallpapers that reference his earlier haunted dollhouse sculpture. ‘Part of the idea of doing those haunted wallpapers was to insist on a dark presence – things can look cheerful on the surface, but I wanted a kind of depth, a darkness,’ he says. ‘I like the fact that fans aren't just fans, that it goes from adoration of the star to, “I need that star to look back at me”. I love the interchange of energies and the forms of relationship that are unbalanced between the two. I’m interested in the friction about interpersonal relationships.’

At an earlier press conference to introduce the show, Hawkins’ initial silence is broken by his asserting a hope that ‘Potentialities’ ‘doesn’t look too much like a group show’. ‘Maybe to the detriment of my career commercially,’ he clarifies to Wallpaper*, ‘I tend to jump off into a different direction with no consideration that it might have nothing to do with the rest of the work. It’s just how my brain works – I like to follow a fascination until it peters out. Doing is a way of thinking for me, and “Potentialities” [as a title] became a way of describing why it does look like a group show: they’re deep dives into different elements that may be reflective of facets of my personality. It’s a fascination, not a destination.’

Richard Hawkins is at Kunsthalle Wien until 6 April 2026, kunsthallewien.at