Maggi Hambling (b. 1945) is one of Europe’s leading contemporary figurative artists, celebrated both for her paintings of people, the sea, melting polar ice-caps, environmental destruction and was zones, and for her public sculptures, including A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft unveiled in London in 2020, and the monumental Scallop, for the composer Benjamin Britten, on Aldeburgh Beach, Suffolk.
This exhibition presents a series of recent portraits, the largest of which is a self-portrait from 2018 where the artist materializes out of jumbled letters and cyphers, while in the parallel canvas, a black rectangle of an unpainted canvas hovers accusingly within the clutter of the studio. Both artist and painting appear in a reciprocal condition of incompleteness, as if – by some inevitable pact – one must make the other. Nothing is more doubtful, more subject to change, the painting appears to suggest, than certainty itself.
Bearing witness is – and always has been, for Hambling – a matter of looking inwards, of measuring her own responses as much as documenting what she sees and has seen. Important figures from Hambling’s past are portrayed, including her mentor the artist Lett Haines who died in 1978 and the artist Francis Bacon whose face dissolves in laughter, albeit a double-edged laughter in the dark, a maniac and uncontrolled release of energy.
A series of smaller portraits condense their subjects with rapid, gestural marks clinging to a white ground. Within these turbulent formations of paint, looser, more abstracted images emanate an emotional sincerity that springs from the artist’s continuing engagement with life in the here and now. These portraits transmit double moods of humor and doubt, anger and joy, aliveness and mortality. Such doubleness – and accommodation of seeming opposites – is a hallmark of the artist’s work and has been for half a century. Out of incongruity and contradiction, Maggi Hambling finds a means of confronting truths and achieving a realness that in contemporary art feels increasingly rare.
