City of Habits

November 13 to December 20, 2025
Vernissage: Thursday, November 13, 5PM to 8PM

Bradley Ertaskiran is delighted to present City of Habits, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Alexa Hawksworth. Vivid and turbulent, Hawksworth’s cacophony of paintings charts an exhilarating collapse, where chaos and order are inseparably entwined.

Showcasing the artist’s characteristic accelerated style and exceptional technique, City of Habits also features Hawksworth’s recent experiments in manipulating letterform as a formal rather than communicative device. Repeating type and intersecting grids draw from—but do not adhere to—the rational systems that organize our world. These rhythmical undertones summon the process of movable type: bits and blocks of letters and signs assembling and orchestrating themselves in real time. Overlapping forms draw from découpage, stamping, and printmaking, but, in their simultaneous acknowledgement and refusal of an imposed flatness and order, they turn Dada-esque, nonsensical, and disruptive. An eruption of i’s, arabesques in stride, cartwheeling asterisks. Here, typological conventions are pulled and stretched into illegible ends, exposing language as a fragile architecture—one that brilliantly unravels into gesture and noise.

As in her larger practice, Hawksworth’s canvases function as containers; the artist challenges herself to restrict frenetic lifeforms into a single frame, often resulting in generous compositions, bursting at the seams. Crowded shapes and concentrated marks nearly obliterate each other, generating a tension between surface and depth, legibility and noise. This deliberate overstimulation, electrified with a retro palette of fuchsia, yellow, and deep black, channels the sensory saturation of contemporary life, its relentless layering of signals and stimuli. Scenes fracture into intersecting registers and dense pockets of human activity; glimpses into back corners and packed-in crowds show blurs of heady characters and nighttime spectacle. The clamour of multiple conversations and overlapping music is rendered out in swirls and cascading letters. Hawksworth paints a crescendo that never lessens. 

The delightful chaos that props up Hawksworth’s world eventually contributes to its collapse. Her paintings inevitably start to undo themselves, unable to abide by the rational semiotic systems—language, calendars, clock dials—meant to contain and control. An accumulation of repeated habits, rushed time, and insatiable busyness presses against the surface, as the paintings strain to contain the speed of the world around them. This friction culminates in a visceral push and pull of an imposed order turned on its head, in glorious uproar. 

To consult the artist’s profile, please click here.