Steven Michael Hampton
Bather
2020
30 x 22 inches
Through a focus on world leaders and using official, candid, and campaign images, my recent paintings analyze the projection of masculinity in political imaging. In painting these “hard bodies,” my interest is in embracing effects largely considered “kitsch” for its appeal to archetypes and collective reception. As the theatre of American image politics is a global one my paintings pair the “antagonist” to American leaders in an attempt to picture global aesthetics as wholly relational and dependent. 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 photographs 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.