Description

Kajsa (2017). Edition of 50. Seven colour lithographic print on Somerset 300 gsm paper. Printed by Paupers Press, London. 44 x 53 cm (17.3 x 20.8 in). Signed and numbered by the artist on the front. £500.00. Celia Hempton's cropped close-ups of genitalia, and her bright, often acidic palette update the long tradition of the painted nude. Adopting an approach to her subject that can be both raw and tender, Hempton's paintings are each portraits of a kind – having as a title a person's name – but they are all faceless, retaining the sitter's anonymity. This sense of distance from the subject is further developed in the way Hempton transfigures the contours and forms of her painted bodies, rendering them in cool, reductive ways suggestive of other forms of nature. As Hempton explains, "The paintings of body parts came about quite suddenly two years ago but grew out of a desire I've had to make images about, or, of bodies for many years. Previously I had been trying to figure out a way to insert them into my paintings of landscapes and objects but they invariably had a narrative quality I didn't like. So the landscapes became bodies themselves eventually, with drainage pipe orifices and pregnant mounds of rubble. This is inversely true in the nude paintings now, which I think often look like landscapes".