SÃO PAULO.- Galeria Jaqueline Martins has announced the representation of Celia Hempton and present her first solo exhibition in São Paulo which will begin on May 13th.

Celia Hempton's work explores concepts of voyeurism in the post-digital age. In her paintings, performances and installations, she investigates the blurred lines of comfort and consent; desire and subjugation; visibility and opacity, seeking to deconstruct the ways in which humans engage with each other in a rapidly evolving age of hyper-mediation.

For her first solo show at the gallery, Hempton presents new and existing works from across multiple long-standing series: an introduction of her wider body of work which traces over a decade of painting. Presented together, these works make visible a complex, interconnecting web of interests and dynamic approach, her gaze and pace shifting throughout. From the often thickly layered internet paintings to the smoothness of her in-situ nudes, the works combine an immediacy of encounter with a measured revelation of subject and form.

Hempton's self portraits act like extremely intimate diary entries but can also seem distant and detached, moving almost into abstraction. On the motivation behind her works, Hempton notes: “I need to make the painting in order to look at something as thoroughly as I want to. While I have boundaries for myself personally, I try to be open, nonjudgmental, and free when I am making those paintings. I want to be as generous as possible and reflect reality as I see it, rather than describe it from a predetermined point of view.” (Celia Hempton – for Mousse Magazine)

“Celia Hempton has developed an extremely personal and reconizable language of portraiture, moving in and out of traditional forms of representation using repetition, speed and a sensibility for control. Technically, she masterfully swings from thick and violent brusstrokes, to flat, light surfaces. Instead of working with specific subjects, she seeks and stages situations that would trigger tension of some kind. Such conditions are always outside the artist’s control, at least to some degree. Color, shapes and marks convey an interest in power hierachies that are a reflection of the relationships she creates when painting.

For Hempton, the performance happens inside and outside the canvas simultaneously, as she puts herself in a position of audacious duplicity. On one hand, she deals with a fragile, unsteady momentum, and on the other, she stages the scene in a way that tells a profound story about the reality of an encounter. The work of Hempton involves a communication between subjects; an interactive practice that may seem to break down the traditional modernist distinction between the viewing subject and the art object. Her work is a response to intimate issues and contemporary conditions that she is acutely aware of and concerned about, without taking the form of an explicit political statement."

— Text by Nicoletta Lambertucci

“The bodies are real, but they are also imaginary. They live in her head, whether online, or in the room right in front of her. Yet her memories are often more real than the actual experiences, as seconds of images flicker through her mind, performing a slideshow of fuzzily framed moments from her past. Each night, before she sleeps, she travels back to a moment in time, in the woozy dreamscape of the semi-awake space between consciousness and unconsciousness. There she concentrates intensely, allowing her body to enter the scene, to relive the sensations, to experience other bodies, and other places from her past, as she inhabits the image in order to bring it into focus. She knows that these images are just mirages. Phantoms constructed by the light. As soon as she is jolted awake, and opens her eyes, they leave. And then she is back in this world. But the reality of the soft edges of these spaces, wrapped inside the warm sensations they conjure, washed in the hazy colors of the past, is so much more intimate than her present.”

— Text by Kathy Noble

Celia Hempton was born in 1981 in Stroud, UK. She lives and works in London. Her work was recently included in British Art Show 9, a touring exhibition organized by Hayward Gallery across the UK in 2021 and 2022. A monograph, published by Phillida Reid and with accompanying text by Amia Srinivasan, came out in 2022. Her work has also been included in many institutional shows, including ICA Boston, Whitechapel Galleries and Serpentine London, as well as solo presentations at Performance Space NYC, Gwangju Biennale, Art Night commission with ICA London, amongst others. It is held in the collections of The Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia, The British Council and the Government Art Collection, UK.