A Painter of Tension and Transcendence

In the ever-accelerating rhythm of the 21st century, Alexa Hawksworth’s paintings feel like both a reflection and a rupture. Born in 1994 in Hamilton, Canada, and now based in Montreal, Hawksworth crafts canvases that vibrate with contradictory forces — serenity and frenzy, intimacy and spectacle, desire and dissolution. Her work thrives on a refusal to settle into a single visual or conceptual position. Instead, each painting becomes a site of tension: bodies torn and multiplied, colour fields clashing, time itself stretched and twisted.

Hawksworth’s imagery is densely referential — her visual lexicon pulls from the Manson murders, Kandinsky’s writings on spiritual art, Simone Weil’s mystical politics, vintage car ads, and even shanzhai (counterfeit) culture. Yet these sources dissolve in the alchemy of her process, re-emerging as figures and environments both surreal and psychologically charged.

Speed as a Visual Language

In works like Blow Out II (2022), speed becomes a palpable motif. Cool blues and mossy greens collide violently with sunburnt oranges, creating a visual nausea reminiscent of decomposing organic matter and garish LED nightlife. Figures seem to burst from or be sucked into the central silhouette — a gravitational pull made visible. Emoji-like faces drift across the composition, absurd yet unsettling.

This visual turbulence recalls the concept of dromology, articulated by urbanist Paul Virilio: the study of how speed reshapes culture, space, and perception. Hawksworth’s figures don’t merely exist in motion — they are altered by it, stretched and blurred like a body seen from the window of a moving train. Her canvases suggest that velocity is no longer just a property of modern life, but a condition of being.

A Lineage of Motion

Hawksworth’s work converses with a long history of speed in art. From Paleolithic cave paintings with “speed lines” suggesting galloping herds, to J.M.W. Turner’s tempestuous steamships, to the Futurists’ ecstatic machine worship, artists have long grappled with the visual problem of movement. Hawksworth inherits and subverts this tradition, replacing industrial dynamism with a psychological one — her speed is the velocity of thought, dream, and emotional rupture.

Her canvases are populated with elastic limbs, grimacing teeth, and unhinged laughter, often balanced by quieter counterpoints.

I like complexity in creation, but I also want it to be appreciated with clarity.

– Even in her most chaotic scenes, Hawksworth seeks equilibrium, she notes

Exhibition: Stall

At Bradley Ertaskiran, Stall (2023) stands as one of the most significant exhibitions of Alexa Hawksworth’s career, marking a decisive turning point in her practice. Here, she moves away from earlier canvases charged with relentless propulsion and instead embraces something more paradoxical: the poetics of inertia.

This body of work transforms the image of a stalled car into both subject and structuring principle — a metaphor for human constraint and a lens for examining the quiet absurdities of contemporary life. In Hawksworth’s hands, mechanical immobility becomes theatrical, even satirical, inviting viewers to question our culture’s fixation on speed and progress.

Three monumental ten-foot tableaux form the exhibition’s gravitational core. In Obsidian Green Pathfinder (2023), a green SUV is staged in an urban mise-en-scène of curated cool, populated by figures in peak athleisure. Performance Red Integra (2023) compresses a nuclear family into the aspirational geometry of a bright red sedan. These vehicles, once symbols of status and mobility, are recast as ironic props: the family car becomes a claustrophobic domestic capsule; the SUV, a static emblem of escape denied.

Hawksworth’s humor and narrative density permeate every surface. Starbucks baristas drift into the frame; Lady Godiva rides nude past a cluster of Y2K models frozen in glossy ennui. Figures veer toward caricature yet retain a Bosch-like precision, oscillating between fully rendered forms and gestural suggestion. Her worlds are built from a mix of film, pop culture, and art history, peopled with archetypes that act as avatars of desire, aspiration, and manufactured cool.

Crowds in Hawksworth’s paintings are not cohesive masses but chaotic constellations: an Amazon truck improbably packed with people, a Winter Solstice parade swelling with surreal participants, a market stall spilling human oddities into the street. This is maximalism at its most potent — a visual “too much, all at once” that teeters between fascination and vertigo.

Yet despite the frenzy, stillness permeates. The title Stall reads like a cultural diagnosis: a world where movement is endlessly performed but never truly achieved. Hawksworth heightens this sensation by flattening space — stacking figures, animals, and objects vertically as if pinned in a specimen drawer. The result is a frozen theatre of layered moments, an eternal traffic jam where time has stopped but the spectacle continues. people, animals, and objects are stacked vertically, stripped of depth, as if pinned into a specimen drawer. The result is a temporal dissonance, a tableau of layered moments caught in a permanent traffic jam.

An Artist on the Rise

Since graduating from Concordia University in 2020, Hawksworth’s exhibition record has expanded rapidly, with shows at Theta (New York), Public Gallery (London), Harkawik (Los Angeles), and Franz Kaka (Toronto). A forthcoming solo at Bradley Ertaskiran in Montreal (2025) will continue her momentum.

Her work is unsettling but magnetic, dense yet readable — a high-speed collision of emotion, narrative, and painterly precision. In a cultural moment obsessed with immediacy, Hawksworth slows us down just enough to feel the friction.