Harkawik is pleased to present Internal Weather, Eli Hill’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Rooted in both self-portraiture and landscape painting, the exhibition brings together new paintings that continue Hill’s investigation of bodies moving through unstable environments. His figures possess weight and presence while the spaces surrounding them dissolve: bathroom walls pulse with heat, racetracks tilt skyward, water glows with unnatural luminosity. Against this volatile terrain, the body becomes a temporary point of orientation.
Many of Hill’s figures turn away from the viewer, caught mid-rotation or absorbed in their own internal orbit—resisting the expectation that identity or narrative be immediately legible. Across the work, Hill expands his portrayal of masculinity and intimacy, presenting figures that are tender, romantic, yearning, isolated, and occasionally grotesque. Masculinity appears not as a fixed condition but as something continuously performed, projected and negotiated within shared space.
The motif of the running track repeats throughout the exhibition. Hill is a long-distance runner, and the track functions as both a visual structure and a lived environment. In Competition, the track becomes a site of comparison. In Heat Days, Hill captures movement through heavy air and blazing light, where heat becomes almost material and the track’s surface appears to warp beneath the runner.
Alongside these athletic scenes, Hill depicts quieter moments of intimacy in forest clearings, domestic interiors, and dreamlike landscapes. In Throuple in the Sun, overlapping limbs and washing sunlight blur the boundaries between bodies into a single knot of warmth. In Trans Period, a figure folds inward against a saturated red bathroom interior, the intense color amplifying the psychological charge of the moment. Throughout, Hill constructs images where bodies remain steady while the worlds around them shift and dissolve—where physical experience, memory, and environment merge into something closer to weather.
