STEVEN HAMPTON

Through a focus on world leaders and using official, candid, and campaign images, my recent paintings and drawing analyze the representational conventions surrounding projections of power and masculinity in political imaging. In this work my interest is to embrace effects largely considered “kitsch” for its appeal to archetypes and a collective reception. With a focus on scenes of leisure, or, more specifically, “bathers,” a genre that historically depicted an eroticized female nude and addressed modern notions of privacy or cleanliness, my work strives to de-schematize these highly coded scenes. By focusing on constructed and highly coded imagery of world leaders in domestic or familiar settings, exhibiting their tastes, physique, or connection to cultural archetypes, my recent figurative works investigate the role representation plays in contemporary politics.