"Laughing is a very serious business. It’s the only thing that makes life possible. I love the chaos. You can’t present any kind of image to the world when you’re really laughing: the face is in chaos, and it’s almost a sexual thing too. The total abandonment."
Maggi Hambling (b. 1945) is one of Europe’s leading contemporary artists, celebrated both for her paintings of people, the sea, melting polar ice-caps, environmental destruction and war zones, and for her public sculpture, including A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft and A conversation with Oscar Wilde in London and the monumental Scallop, for the composer Benjamin Britten, on Aldeburgh Beach, Suffolk.
She is widely recognized for work that traverses the boundaries of conventional artistic expression and which invites a meditation on the universal relationships between self and environment, people and place.
This exhibition presents a series of sculpture titled Aftermath. These painted totemic works cast in bronze began as found pieces of dead wood. Out of gnarled natural forms, Hambling has coaxed the presence of imaginary beings. Alternately animal and human, familiar and other worldly, the sculptures emanate a variety of moods and art historical resonance from Surrealism to medieval polychromy.
The strange creatures of Aftermath conflate the forms of the ancient past - grave portraits, gargoyles, and relics - with the spirit of life to create vital contemporary works of sculpture. Viewed from different angles or lighting conditions, the sculptures reveal varying aspects and interpretations, echoing Baudelaire's description of sculpture as simultaneously vague and elusive. Hambling’s Aftermath explore themes of metamorphosis and hybridity, drawing inspiration from mythology, literature, and alchemy.
