In the early 90’s, after re-presenting graphic decorative borders as surrogates for modernist tropes Hemsworth began to change both the imagery he was using and the schematics for his compositions. For me, the starting point for his current work came when he began to include the figure, the highlight being his monumental 1998 ‘rabbit’ painting ‘Between Heaven and Hell’. This painting depicted, in a few very simple lines and colours, a rabbit on a hill with its back toward the viewer gazing into a cloudscape. Of course this wasn’t a literal or hyper-real transcription of a rabbit on a hill but a seriously pared down graphic representation. Despite this, the homage to Casper-David Friedrich’s romantic painting ‘The wanderer above the sea of fog’ was obvious, but what also fascinated me was the way Hemsworth set up a simultaneous dialogue with painting’s generic histories by depicting figuration alongside formalist abstraction as a set of signs. Hemsworth’s paintings became disarmingly simple, ciphered interpretations of figuration and abstraction, what appeared as images culled from children’s early learning books hid complex multiple readings, it was as if we were being asked to understand these paintings as something else, as the opposite to what was depicted.

But how and why did Hemsworth arrive at this remarkable juxtapositioning of flat graphic signs that re-presented ‘traditional, window-on-the world’ figuration with formalist abstraction. A number of things come to mind. Hemsworth is currently Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths and has kept abreast with the changing face of contemporary fine art thinking since the late ‘60’s. He has always been involved with and encouraged an up-to-date approach to critical debate about the nature, context and making of contemporary art amongst his students on the Goldsmiths masters programme. This has made him into an extraordinariliy influencial teacher who has enabled generations of young artists to adopt their own positions.

The antecedence of his work is minimalism and pop art, through conceptual art, postmodern painting to his current pre-occupation with the ironic shift between familiar cartoon narratives, modernism and abstract formalism. Hemsworth has been developing a consistent line of enquiry in his work that questions the ‘truths’ and anomalies of visual representation in the history of art and since the early 80’s Hemsworth has considered that the most effective way for him to challenge the orthodoxies of pictorial representation is through painting.