Maggi Hambling was taught by Cedric Morris and Lett Haines in East Anglia, and then trained at Ipswich School of Art, Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and the Slade. She is primarily a figurative painter, although she has made abstract works and used other media. Her art is redolent with rich color and she manages both to suggest physical presence and the real world through the strength and weight of her drawing, and to transcend it, often including the imaginary and symbolic in her paintings of people and places.
Hambling was the first Artist in Residence to be appointed by the National Gallery in London in 1980-1. She worked from the collection (making studies after Manet, Matisse. Rubens and Rembrandt among other artists) and also painted a warder, Mr. McDonald (National Gallery)- She wrote on Velazquez for the magazine Modern Painters in 1987, her interest in Spanish culture stimulated by a visit to the country ten years earlier Having watched bull fights, she painted a series of works depicting different stages of the ritual. In one painting a straining rope cuts across the canvas, dragging the body of the beast away. Hambling has referred to the animal in these paintings as a representation of herself, subverting the use of the bull as a symbol of masculine power in the work of Picasso
Picasso's fascination with the minotaur is likely to have informed Hambling's work on mythical themes. In Pasiphae and the Bull (Conception of the Minotaur) (1987. collection Tim Curry), the black bulk of the bull thrown into relief by a hot orange background contrasts with the fragility of the female figure beneath it. In A Minotaur Surprised while Eating (which again Hambling has referred to as a self-portrait) the composition, and the unsettling transformation of paint into a bloody trail, are reminiscent of Goya's terrifying Saturn (1820-3, Prado, Madrid), in the catalogue foreword of Hambling's exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1987, the Writer Marina Warner remarked; 'Hambling, whose first love was the stage, has worn frocks only to perform, cultivated a deep voice, and elected to present herself as masterful... Not for Hambling the female symbols, transitory materials, ephemeral forms and cyclical rhythms of contemporary women's art; her art exacts recognizably the same discipline and materials and sometimes subject matter - as the tradition practiced by Old Masters from Rubens to Picasso. She sees no reason for this not to be female ground.'
Among Hambling's works are powerful portraits of women. Commissioned to paint Professor Dorothy Hodgkin by the National Portrait Gallery in 1985, she portrayed the scientist at her desk, the heavy dark frames of her glasses suggesting her ability to scrutinize and analyze, and her flurry of four hands, ail engaged in different activities, a striking visual metaphor for ceaseless intellectual activity. A very different image of femininity is seen in the 1986-7 painting Gulf Women Prepare for War. Figures veiled in traditional dark dress wield their weapons in the desert They are represented as self-contained and threatening, in contrast to the stereotypical images of' peasant women crying in the streets'' saturate media coverage of conflicts and were criticised by the journalist and war correspondent Kate Adie.; Hambling donated the painting to the collection of art by women being formed by New Hall, Cambridge University, and her work is also owned by the Imperial War Museum. In Shop Window, Red Light District, Barcelona (1985, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon) we see prostitutes parading themselves as different types of sexual fantasy. Hambling has also made a series of portraits, paintings and bronze sculptures of her lover, the legendary Soho habitue and artists' model, Henrietta Moraes, who died in 1999. Moraes is shown with a can of Special Brew beer, in a fury, and posing with a skull, in works that pay tribute to her exuberance, without glossing over her self-destructiveness.
Hambling is perhaps best known for the series of portraits of Max Wall which she began in 1981 and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery two years later. Max Wall and his Image (1981. late} shows the clown and actor (he was an acclaimed Vladimir in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot) in the artist's studio. Wall is resting, wearing his trademark heavy boots, the shadows behind him eerily inhabited by the distinctive silhouette of his comic creation, Professor Wallofski. Hambling has spoken of the importance of the clown 'in demonstrating to us the absurdities of life'." Her first oil painting was of a clown, and her work on the subject was seen alongside that of Laura Knight, in the exhibition Behind the Auguste Mask: an exploration of the Clown Character, at Brighton's Gardner Centre Gallery in 1985. The darkness at the heart of comedy informed Hambling's paintings about laughter, including Suicide Laugh and Laugh Defying Death (both 1992).
More recently Hambling has portrayed a writer who made one of his central themes the masks we show to the world and the ambiguity of identity. Commissioned to make a monument to a long-time hero, Oscar Wilde, Hambling produced a series of bronze sculptures, paintings and a statue, a granite sarcophagus from which Wilde rises, and on which the passer-by can sit and imagine conversing with him on the way to London's theatre land. Hambling has also made work about specific locations, painting the skies over Suffolk. Over the past decade her stature has been recognized. In 1991 her first major American exhibition was held at the Yale Center for British Art, and in 1995 she was joint winner of the Jerwood Painting Prize. |
