Painted Places
Maison d’Art
February 21–May 30, 2026
Los Angeles
To encounter these late paintings of William L. Hawkins in this space, at this place, during this time, is to revel in the power of genuine connection—and, dare I say it, the perpetual joys of painting—reminding my irritated (or bored) eyes that one good thing about the current spread of so much lacking painting is that it makes the great stuff sing—and stick. Hawkins’s paintings have plenty of “stick” all on their own, but to put them—with what they’re made of and what they depict—in this building in Los Angeles (his first solo show here, by the way) is nothing less than a grounding and sublime layering of place upon place upon place.
What could be called Maison d’Art’s project started ten years ago with a billboard installed on the roof of a low-rise building, displaying, from 2016 to 2018, singular images by Douglas Gordon, Peter Regli, Steve Bishop, Karl Holmqvist, Daniel Pflumm, and Olivier Mosset. The last two also had solo exhibitions in a three-walled white cube, a space that worked just fine. Then it stopped.
Then, in April 2020, Maison d’Art reappeared in a “house”—and what a house. A Greek Revival building on Melrose Avenue built in 1928, it is elegant and refreshingly not too big. The gallery’s programming also ramped up, starting with a show of Man Ray’s “Natural Paintings,” and on to other unexpected presentations such as a Cady Noland solo show, a deep dive into the relationship between Cy Twombly and collector Reiner Speck, and a reversal of the trajectory of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s monumental Knife Slicing Through Wall (1989) from outside to inside (for many years it “cut through” a wall of Margo Leavin’s legendary West Hollywood gallery). This indulgence sets the stage for Hawkins’s exhibition and reinforces the complexities of place that ground his late paintings on view here.
Hawkins was clearly the type of artist who did the kind of research that propels the work instead of distracting us. The first page of the gallery’s PDF presents an image of Hawkins’s well-worn leather suitcase in which he carried printed matter and images that mattered to him: advertisements, articles, postcards and such, all relating to specific places not only in his home base of Columbus, Ohio, but others he never visited like Niagara Falls, largely salvaged from his Franklin Park neighborhood.
The paintings prove that his tactile way of working with his archive is what makes them rich and complex. Rather than merely painting from the photograph, Hawkins did what was required, as he put it, to “bring the picture out.” Standing in the main room of the gallery, I also take this as a commitment to the goal of making the internal external without sacrificing one’s self. (His careful placement of “WILLIAM L. HAWKINS BORN KY JULY 27 1895” on the surface of each canvas seals the deal and contributes to the overall vitality of their rhythm and form. It also reminds us that he was nearly one hundred years old when he made them!) The eleven paintings brought together here share a continuity of structure and format that enabled him to do that primarily via the risky enterprise of using enamel paint. (I’m no conservator, but the fantastic condition of these paintings stuns.) Even without his documented procedure of occasionally adding materials like cornmeal, sawdust, and sand to the paint, the simultaneous fluidity and solidity of his surfaces impress. They are daubed and dappled, brushed and drawn, positioned and set. Once again, they stick.
