Richard Hawkins
Two Short Films (Regarding Forrest Bess)
28 July–10 August 2025
Online
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“If one fears bedazzlement to the point of never having seen (in the height of summer and one’s red face bathed in sweat) that the sun was disgusting and pink like a phallus, open and urinating like a urethra, it is perhaps useless to open again, amidst nature, eyes laden with questions; nature responds like the crack of a riding crop, as gallant as the pretty tamers one admires in the windows of pornographic bookstores.”

a. SQUIRE is pleased to present, online and for a limited time only, two unseen short films by Richard Hawkins in which he invokes the medico-mystical sexology of Forrest Bess and in particular Bess’s quest, through the latter half of the 1950s, to promote the potentially obliterative pleasures of male “urethral eroticism”.
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Richard Hawkins (b. 1961, Mexia, TX) lives and works in Los Angeles, where he is Professor at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. His work is the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, opening in November. Recent solo exhibitions include Greene Naftali, New York (2025); Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (2025); Reena Spaulings, Los Angeles (2024); and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin (2024). Hawkins has also mounted institutional solo exhibitions at Tate Liverpool (2014); Le Consortium, Dijon (2013); and the Art Institute of Chicago (2010, travelling the following year to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles). His works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others.

With thanks to Galerie Buchholz.