Wes Hempel has been committed to reinvisioning the depiction of masculinity in contemporary art.  By setting psychologically acute portraits of modern-day males against backdrops appropriated from such disparate sources as Neoclassical history painting and Dutch Golden Age landscapes, the artist's works forge provocative dialogues between the exigencies of the present and its endowments from the past.

Hempel's paintings explore the divide between the ancient and modern, reason and passion, august ideals and the profoundly individual.  The artist recasts modern male figures in historical and culturally iconographic settings, provoking both a re-thinking of assumed narratives and mythic themes and inviting a similar reconsideration of contemporary life, masculinity and sexual norms. 

His website is Wes Hemple

He is represented by George Billis Gallery (New York)