West, London
Celia Hempton
Transplant
Phillida ReidCelia Hempton’s solo exhibition Transplant at Phillida Reid features new paintings from series that coalesce around themes of human interference – both altruistic and in violation or force – involving actions of displacement and control, across buildings and bodies. A new series focuses on imagery of kidneys and views of kidney transplants, whilst another is painted on sites of construction and demolition, combined with selected recent Surveillance paintings, Hempton's works painted from live security cameras around the world. Hempton's work both challenges and acknowledges historical painting genres – the nude, portrait, landscape – painting from life (either with models in the studio or 'en plein air', on sites imbued with a sense of disturbance or instability, from construction sites to active volcanoes) and from live webcam streams. Transplant sees themes of trauma and salvage interspersed with reflections on how we engage with the world around us, both remotely - in digital darkness - and in 'real life'. The cool distance of experiences online can be abruptly punctuated by intensely visceral interactions and imagery. Hempton's work, across series, mirrors this fragmented spectrum of emotional perception. "Hempton fashions lush flush surfaces beaming with light. Elsewhere, overripe canvases thick with oil transpire as hyperreal landscapes. Salvage, human waste, and the concept of detritus are interrogated in abundant abstract expressionist cartographies. They each look as if they were unspooled from within the crevices of multiple human psyches. Rigorous disciplinary practice enables the artist to eschew generic typologies of representation. Here, each canvas ranges in scope. Their dimension and proportion, scaled to a sense of necessary life. Hempton’s paintings in Transplant range from what has become her signature ‘handheld-size’ to larger-than-life panoramas. In the enclosure of looking, what binds these scenes is the signification of what is experienced and what is felt. Painted from life, from various proximities and distances, spectators are invited to relieve the affective possibilities of emotion through colour and complex geometry. Beneath each seam, ensconced within the skin of flax, wood and bone, within the pore of the cross-stitch, is another myth, one worthy of being disentangled." —Prof. Dr Omar Kholeif