Ben

‘Ben, 2017’ is a lithographic print from her series of nude paintings of friends made in the artists studio. Using a pastel palette of pale green and yellow, the work depicts a male figure lying on his front – a position of softness, penetrability and perhaps submission, and one that echoes historical nude painting of female subjects whilst also decentralising the phallus as the singular site of male eroticism. Hempton’s nude is both faceless and silent, interchangeably a subject, muse, and commodity. And yet her subjects are painted with a certain tenderness, recalling both the blurred soft focus of bedroom lighting but also a consideration of the trust between artist and subject – implicit and yet so frequently absent throughout the canon of art history.