From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Human curiosity draws us to look even as we flinch away. To a degree, we are all Plato’s Leontius, torn between our desire to look at corpses and our self-disgust, but certain artists are unusually willing to push the borders of their own discomfort. The territory of the painter Celia Hempton is the perilous edge of fascination and revulsion: intimate orifices, dead animals, masturbating men on video chat sites, the aftermath of violence.
Mount Laurel, New Jersey, United States, 1st September 2024 (2024), Celia Hempton. Photo: Benjamin Westoby; courtesy the artist/Phillida Reid, London; © the artist
Hempton’s exhibition ‘Transplant’ at Phillida Reid in London extends her exploration of the instinct to look rather than look away. In three linked bodies of work, she has sought out instruments of intrusion and permitted her eyes to penetrate boundaries of various kinds. For the central series she worked with renal specialists, painting human kidneys mid-surgery. This is close territory for Hempton, whose young child has recently undergone a transplant. The painted kidneys are glossy, vivid and yellow-edged, floating against the blues of medical scrubs or sheen of a metal tray. You can sense the denseness and weight of them but also the disjuncture of an object out of place, literally disembodied.
The colours and forms of Hempton’s surgical paintings find a counterpart in a densely painted view of the setting sun – a red orb suspended in a field of deepening blue – and a night scene in which headlights hitting water droplets create a kidney-shaped lens flare. Both are from Surveillance, a series using imagery from public CCTV cameras at locations including the interior of a car park in Belgium and a cramped waiting room in India. Technology carries the invading eye around the world, affording Hempton godlike access. Privacy or solitude in public spaces is illusory: we are all watched over.
For the final series, Hempton visited demolition and construction sites around London, painting urban landscapes in situ, capturing episodes of transition as the insides of a building are exposed by machine violence, and architecture is reduced to brute materials. In Memory of a demolition, 13th August 2024, metals ducts, funnels and wires dangle like entrails within an eviscerated block. So embedded was Hempton in the places of her paintings that some carry fragments of glass and rubble in their surfaces.
Unlike Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach in post-war London, Hempton is not recording the resurrection of a wounded city. This demolition and construction is part of shifting gentrification: the transplanting of first-time homeowners, technology startups and restaurant chains into formerly unshiny quarters of the city.
Her colour palette is also distinct. Kossoff and Auerbach’s paintings carry the drab, sticky browns and reds of brick dust, splintered wood and London clay. Their surfaces are runnelled like mud tracks sliced by tyres in damp ground. Hempton’s instead have the jaunty brightness of the plastic-clad wires and processed aluminium that make up the circulatory systems of shoddy 20th-century office blocks.
Hempton teases out pictorial affinities, offering the jagged teeth of a metal digger bucket as a crude echo of surgical instruments, running licks of efficient hospital blue between the three series. Her impasto is sometimes so thick that it is unclear whether we are looking at a body part or a lump of construction debris: everything is abstracted to rough forms and colours. Her paint feels weighty with emotion. ‘Transplant’ is unified by a theme of ‘benevolent trespass’, the invasion of one body by another – by a surgeon bearing a donated kidney, by a developer armed with a wrecking ball, by the glass eye of a security camera – in the belief that transgression is justified by the promise of protection or cure.
Figurative painting broadly involves the translation of a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional image. Since the Renaissance, artists have been interested in what lies beneath – the structures of things that give form to the material world. Working with the physician Marcantonio della Torre, between 1489 and 1513 Leonardo dissected, studied and sketched the anatomy of more than 30 human bodies. In 1632, Rembrandt portrayed Dr Nicolaes Tulp describing the tendons of the human arm to colleagues in Amsterdam, probing the complex structure of a dissected limb with his forceps. In matters of the arm, the anatomist’s enterprise is echoed in the painter’s: Rembrandt and Tulp are both men engaged in the delicate interplay of hand and eye, of penetrating observation and the dextrous wielding of instruments.
Transplant (2024), Celia Hempton. Photo: Benjamin Westoby; courtesy the artist/Phillida Reid, London; © the artist
The ability to look rather than look away is, for some, a route to emotional as well as anatomical understanding. After suffering a miscarriage in Detroit in 1932, Frida Kahlo scandalised her doctors by requesting anatomy manuals. They were reluctant, not wishing to upset their patient, but her husband Diego Rivera explained that she was an artist and needed to visualise what had happened to her. Illustrations of a foetus in utero, a gravid uterus and a female pelvic bone all appear floating around her bedridden body in the painting Henry Ford Hospital (1932).
Like Hempton, Barbara Hepworth became interested in surgery following a child’s illness: the sculptor’s daughter Sarah was hospitalised with osteomyelitis in 1944. Through her subsequent friendship with the surgeon Norman Capener, Hepworth observed and sketched surgical procedures over the course of two years. She sensed ‘a close affinity between the work and approach both of physicians and surgeons, and painters and sculptors’. Beyond the marriage of hand and eye, it is the willingness to look, and look beyond.
From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.