Vincent Hawkins - A Line of Ashes

8 February – 29 March 2026
Preview: 7 February, 6–8pm
Open weekends, Saturdays and Sundays, 12–5pm
TKE Studios, Margate

TKE Studios is pleased to present A Line of Ashes, an exhibition of new and recent works by Vincent Hawkins. Bringing together painting and printmaking, the exhibition offers a focused look at an artist whose practice has been shaped by persistence, material sensitivity, and a long-term commitment to process.

Hawkins’ works are built through accumulation, abrasion, and revision. Surfaces are worked, scraped back, and reworked, carrying visible traces of decisions made and undone. Lines appear, disappear, and reassert themselves. Rather than presenting a fixed image, the paintings register a sequence of actions. What remains is a quiet tension between structure and instability, between what holds and what gives way.

A key thread in Hawkins’ work is an interest in what happens after collapse. Not collapse as spectacle or failure, but as a point of transition. His surfaces often suggest a state after breakdown, where forms reassemble and new possibilities for painting begin to emerge. Areas of density sit alongside thinner passages; marks are tested, interrupted, and resumed. The works feel provisional, shaped by pressure, repetition, and necessity rather than certainty.

There is also a strong sense of containment throughout the work. Edges, borders, and linear frameworks appear and dissolve, acting as both limits and supports. This creates a continual negotiation between control and release. Nothing feels purely spontaneous, yet nothing feels entirely predetermined. Each work arrives through a sustained process of adjustment.

Born in Hertfordshire in 1959, Hawkins studied painting at Maidstone College of Art between 1984 and 1987. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including solo exhibitions in London, Paris, and Chicago. Over several decades, he has maintained a rigorous, materially driven approach to painting and printmaking.

Now based in Margate, A Line of Ashes marks a significant presentation of Hawkins’ work within the town. The exhibition situates his work within a wider conversation about the endurance of painting as a medium that can still absorb doubt, revision, and time.

Rather than aiming for resolution, Hawkins’ works stay open. They record a process of testing, erasing, and rebuilding. In doing so, they invite viewers to spend time with surfaces that hold their own history of making.