Hawkes is a self-taught artist who has worked predominantly throughout his life with wood. He is a renowned sculptor and modern furniture designer and maker who has created work in his signature style for many private and corporate clients.
His monumental abstract sculptures have been installed in public spaces including La Défense, Paris and in Covent Garden and New Bond Street, London. They are also held in many prestigious private collections.
Hawkes’s work encompasses abstract flowing forms, chasing purity in curves, a love of sacred & fractal geometry, all inspired in the early 70’s by Henry Moore and Naum Gabo.
“I have always been chasing the line. The line’s purity and shape has always fascinated me. It’s the romantic side of geometry. ‘The Sphelix’ which I did in 1978 with David Constable is a great example of this. It is all beautiful curves and yet it’s made with a straight line. A wonderful enigma. The Sphelix has been described as the first four-dimensional sculpture. It exists in 3D but the fourth dimension is the time that it takes to twist it together to make a sphere”.
After a brief and uninspiring time at Art School he joined the communal workshops ‘401½’ in Vauxhall, London which were founded in the early 1970s and have since grown to take on historical significance in the world of art & design as one of the birth places of the artistic crafts renaissance in Britain. In 1978, Hawkes set up his own studio PW Limited which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2003.
Hawkes’s has completed numerous commissions. Most memorable were Lord Bath’s millennium bed and library, the Epsom Derby Trophy, a stand in Westminster Palace for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and a writing desk for Monte Carlo’s Governor General.
In sculpture, the ‘Sphelix’, is a piece central to his work which has been created on a monumental scale as well as in small maquette form. Hawkes describes it as the joining of a sphere and a helix: a new global shape. It is deceptively simple in form and endlessly metamorphic. A new monumental work entitled ‘What’s the Point’ proposed for the Masterpiece Sculpture Walk, has since been delivered to a private garden in London belonging to a well-known collector. Hawkes’s wall relief sculpture ‘Taxol’, 2016 was placed at the Royal Marsden Hospital, London in honour of those who fight cancer, as his wife successfully has done. He considers this installation one of his finest moments of his career.
Hawkes’s solo exhibition ‘Chasing the Line’ was held at Sladmore in 2020.
Artworks
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Sphelix 920
Johnny Hawkes
Bronze, signed and numbered 1 from an edition of 10. In green or blue patina.
Click below to listen to the full episode of Johnny Hawkes on The Art in Mayfair Podcast:
Johnny Hawkes talks to Maeve Doyle about the origins of his sculpture ‘Sphelix’: the “perfect shape, …an enigma on the curve”. Sladmore was delighted to show the monumental ‘Sphelix’ on New Bond Street as part of the Art in Mayfair Sculpture Trail this summer. Listen to hear Johnny’s fascinating story about its creation and his journey as a sculptor and furniture maker.
Exhibitions
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