Title: Untitled

Year: 2013

Media: Acrylic on paper

Size: 38.5 x 52 cm

Bio: Celia Hempton’s (b. Stroud, UK. Lives and works in London) paintings, performances and installations investigate the blurred lines of comfort and consent; desire and subjugation; visibility and opacity, seeking to deconstruct the ways in which we engage with humans in a rapidly evolving age of hyper-mediation. Formally, Hempton’s paintings, which range in scale from intimate to life-size, acknowledge the tropes of history painting and the often subjugated female body. Hempton’s richly layered paintings directly play with and confront this historical dynamism, producing tactile celebrations of the body, alongside multiple perspectives on how the bodily gaze is constructed.

‘Perhaps it is Hempton’s sense of her own discomfort and vulnerability in these moments that allows her to create images that, just as often as they depict human aggression, also capture the vulnerability, loneliness and alienation of contemporary life, especially as it is lived out online. Her paintings remind us that nowhere and no one is safe, and that, paradoxically, a certain sense of safety can be drawn from owning up to that fact. But crucially, in Hempton’s paintings, human vulnerability does not operate as an excuse or a denial of violence. It is simply there, real: a reminder, perhaps, of the distance between the psychosexual script we are expected to rehearse and the vast complexity of each human life.’

- Amia Srinivasan, 2021