Littlejohn Contemporary is pleased to present WORK THAT WILL NOT WAIT FOR YOU, an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Irish-born Timothy Hawkesworth. The exhibition is Hawkesworth’s 8th solo show at Littlejohn Contemporary and will be on view from October 11th through November 10th, 2012.

Timothy Hawkesworth has long made disintegration and death the themes of his vigorous, battered, chaotic, yet deeply touching and humanistic works of art.

A gifted writer as well as painter, Hawkesworth has written about how he creates his work, often through a difficult and frustrating process of “making and unmaking” an image. His process includes applying thin layers of wax and pigment, as well as burning. In the “unmaking” phase, he makes no attempt to erase a mistake or strive for perfection; rather, he digs deeper, with an ever-increasing urgency, to the very core of memory.

Hawkesworth doesn’t dwell on the tragic aspects of what it means to be human. Instead, he layers his paintings and drawings with his own and communal histories. In so doing, in the words of Aiden Dunne, art critic for Irish Times, “he infuses his historical terrain with tremendous generative potential.” (2006)

Hawkesworth is fearless, willing to expose his own vulnerability, frailty, and awkwardness; he demands the same of the viewer. There is little in the way of obvious symbolism or reference points to aid in the viewing of his art.

The critic Ty Clever described the experience of being with Hawkesworth’s art in this way: “The dynamic, torn intimacy that occurs in the work finds embodiment in our relationship with it. These paintings won’t hold still. They change over the time spent with them, and they change in the memory. This is work that will not wait for you.” (2006)

Educated in Trinity College Dublin, Hawkesworth has been exhibiting regularly in New York and Ireland. His work has received considerable critical attention and is in many public and private collections, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Dublin City Gallery Hugh Lane, Dublin, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and the List Visual Arts Center at MIT in Cambridge, MA.