Celia Hempton at Phillida Reid

Phillida Reid

5 October until 30 November 2024

Entering the exhibition Transplant, the latest solo show by British artist Celia Hempton at Phillida Reid in Bloomsbury, we encounter a large diptych painting on the left-hand wall – a textural abstraction in which layers and daubs of colourful oil paint dance and collide across the canvas surface. Rhythmic, playful and ostensibly abstract in its rendering, the elusive work nonetheless depicts a real, more sobering landscape – the urban skyline of London from the rubble of a cavernous demolition site. Titled Demolishing a building in central London, 17th August 2024, a sense of rupture is displaced by harmonious hues of steel grey and muted blue alongside vibrant flashes of vermillion and pastel pink. 

Hempton is an artist who seeks out beauty in the unexpected. Through the vocabulary of paint, she investigates the politics of visibility. In particular, the act of observing spaces that typically elude the gaze or even the knowledge of the general public. Whether through her CCTV inspired Surveillance paintings of live security cameras from across the world, her Chat Random works (in which she paints the portraits of men while browsing online webcams), her volcano paintings captured in the active crater of Stromboli, or her Construction and Demolition series created en plein air in busy, urban building sites – Hempton’s practice trespasses into typically concealed or potentially hazardous territories. All are psychologically loaded ‘non-spaces’ in a state of unravelling or becoming. By shifting her focus onto such sites, many of which articulate the nature of 21st-century living, her works evoke a sense of discomfort. We are made aware of the omnipresence of surveillance, as well as our own voyeurism, especially when standing before works such as Anand, India, 28th June 2024 – a painting capturing a young man seated at a bus stop in rural India through CCTV camera footage. It raises the question: who has the right to observe? And at what cost is such accessible surveillance? 

Set against the exposed brick walls of Phillida Reid gallery, the artist’s works pay homage to virtual and physical terrains on the threshold of transition. But Transplant also takes its name from a more personal subject. The works in the second room comprising the Kidneys series illustrate real-life scenes from the operating table: the invasive surgery of kidney transplants, a procedure that was undergone by Hempton's infant daughter two years ago. In this sense, Hempton’s series Kidneys symbolises another kind of generous offering – a response to familial trauma in which a disquieting and usually veiled subject matter is processed; the memory materialised in paint. While a literal representation (the artist sourced images online, in publications and from videos accessed with generous consent of surgical teams and patients), these small works offer sensual texture and tactility, akin to her abstractions next door. Each canvas is layered with thick, impasto brushstrokes of paint with surgical precision, so much so that a few of the canvases transform into corporeal, sculpture-like forms. Painting transplants sculpture, but also memory and private grief.

Born in Stroud in 1981, Hempton studied at the Glasgow School of Art followed by the Royal College of Art for an MA in Painting. She came of age in the era before the ubiquity of digital technologies and social media. Yet such subject matter – and the way the digital sphere has changed our ways of seeing – stands at the heart of her practice. “I’m just really interested in looking – that’s what drives my work. That’s how I understand the world” she once remarked in an interview for 10Magazine. Rooted in curiosity, Hempton’s art utilises painting as a mode of performative investigation – it is not merely a means to mirror and reflect the exterior world, or intuitively capture feeling on canvas, but a vehicle to meditate upon spectatorship itself. 

Hempton’s works are striking for their quiet power. Beyond the act of looking, the themes of control and vulnerability emerge as conceptual strands in her work. “Hempton often takes transgression and discomfort as a precondition of her work” writes Amia Srinivasan, the philosopher, feminist and author of The Right to Sex (2021) in her essay On Attention, a foreword to a 2022 publication on the artist. As Srinivasan points out, in the artist’s series such as the Chat Random portraits and the Demolition series, Hempton deliberately takes herself out of her comfort zone, trespassing into predominantly male spaces. 

By pursuing discomfort as artistic inspiration and material, Hempton exposes her own vulnerability, whether that involves her sitting in the middle of a demolition site, or allowing herself to be observed in turn by strangers on webcams as she paints them. In the case of Transplant, she seeks out discomfort by closely witnessing the intimate detail of invasive surgery, one that is uncomfortably close to home. By the time we’ve made our way through the entire exhibition, we begin to view Transplant as referring not only to the surgery of her young daughter, but acting as a broader metaphor – the relentless manoeuvring and shifting of the artist’s body and gaze into unknown and unexplored territories.  

On the surface, Hempton’s paintings are a sensual and playful delight for the eyes. Yet upon deeper inspection, they are a meditation upon human fragility and the unstoppable and darker forces around us; the potential of violence and the realities of contemporary surveillance and alienation, all of which have been conveyed through multiple screens, algorithms, gazes and perspectives. 

Lydia Figes, Curator of Digital

Celia Hempton: Transplant

Phillida Reid, 10–16 Grape Street
5 October–30 November 2024