Celia Hempton

Celia Hempton (born 1981, UK) makes abstract and figurative paintings, sculptures and installations and sound works that often explore the human form and the places and landscapes it inhabits. Hempton has had numerous gallery and museum exhibitions, and much of her work plays with the graphic and sensual explorations of flesh. Hempton achieves this by displaying, exposing, and playing with the performance of the body in our social encounters and relationships, making the human body resemble a landscape in itself.

In her most recent body of work, Chat Random, the artist find her subjects online. Depending on the tolerance and disposition of her subjects, her paintings are worked extensible while she study the body. In contrast, the brief interactions lead to a fluid, often extremely graphic or unfinished piece. Even though the face of her subjects is always cut, the blunt exposure of the human body through bold color and brush strokes creates a sense of familiar connection to the unknown.

Hempton has had solo exhibitions at Southard Reid in London (2017); Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London (2016); Galerie Sultana in Paris (2015); and Galleria Lorcan O’Neill in Rome (2014); along with group exhibitions at The Royal Standard in Liverpool; Cheim & Read in New York; and Mendes Wood DM in São Paulo. She lives and works in London. 

Courtesy of Robert Fontaine Gallery