Maggi Hambling Edge
Maggi Hambling Edge
Maggi Hambling Edge New paintings & sculpture
2 March–13 April 2017
Marlborough Fine Art 6 Albemarle Street London W1S 4BY + 44 (0)20 7629 5161 frossi@marlboroughfineart.com www.marlboroughlondon.com
Maggi Hambling: Edge James Cahill
“It was like a circle of madness, a circle of hell… We saw some injured calling, crying for help. We saw the fire everywhere. We smelled the smell of the barrel bomb.” AMMAR AL-SELMO, HEAD OF A BRANCH OF THE SYRIAN CIVIL DEFENCE, ALEPPO, SEPTEMBER 2016
“Suddenly it seems as if the dawn were coming: it is like water purling over ice and the ice is blue with a rising mist, glaciers sunk in emerald green, chamois and antelopes, golden groupers, sea cows mooching along and the amber jack leaping over the Arctic rim…” HENRY MILLER, TROPIC OF CANCER, 1934
2016
A boat is adrift on the deep blue sea. Seen from above, its bulging hull seems to sink beneath the surface of the waves. The outline of the vessel glints in the sunlight, through the water, like a gilt frame. Its contents are hard to make out — smothered by foaming sea — but not impossible to guess: a crowd of people, packed together and falling over the sides. Titled , this painting by Maggi Hambling depicts a boat full of trafficked migrants. “I kept seeing pictures, on television and elsewhere, of these people, and hearing on the news that a whole boat had gone down”, she recalls. “Boats were being abandoned by the traffickers and left to drift and disappear.” presents one such boat from a bird’s eye view, or through a helicopter’s hovering lens. The gold paint which picks out the shape of the vessel is an incongruous touch — a dark intimation of the wealth which the boat’s inhabitants will never attain, and a symbol of the greed of the people who have trafficked them. The gold shines out, but the huddled figures have almost been obliterated. The title of acts like a zoom lens, telescopically training our attention onto the immediate facts of the image — a particular boat on a doomed journey in — and then zooming out, widening into a symbol. is also a painting of a year, and a microcosm of the events which took place in that time. The image of a boat at sea becomes a metaphor for larger realities. Hambling made the painting gradually, against the background of interrelated world events — the wars in Syria and beyond, the migration crisis in Europe, economic instability, Brexit, and Trump. Isolated and bereft of coordinates, the boat is an island. Hambling repeatedly
rotated the canvas as she worked, as if from a circling aerial perspective, throwing the axis of the picture (top versus bottom) into uncertainty, and enhancing the sense of a lost vessel, and a year in freefall. is at the centre of Hambling’s new exhibition ‘Edge’ at Marlborough, London, which takes place from March to April . The painting’s themes of human disaster and indifferent nature recur throughout her latest works. is picture of uncertainty — the vessel is on the brink of sinking but remains afloat; its inhabitants are on the edge of destruction. Hambling’s exhibition comprises a range of paintings and sculptures in which this condition of being ‘on the edge’ is the unifying characteristic. Her works address multiple subjects — cities, landscapes, human lives both real and imaginary. But all are concerned with a moment of transition, the point at which a known quantity unravels into something strange and new. ALEPPO
refers to the migrant crisis in Europe last year. Four new paintings address the primary source of that crisis, the war in Syria. In late , the city of Aleppo suffered a catastrophic bombardment by Russian planes and Syrian government forces trying to take control of rebel-held precincts through a strategy of aggressive depopulation which targeted civilians and civilian buildings. Each of Hambling’s paintings is simply titled Aleppo, and evokes the turmoil of the city and its people under siege. Aleppo І imagines the city as an impressionistic pile of rubble beneath a bone-white sky. The paint rises in stacks, tracing an erratic skyline
and erupting into clouds of dust. In Aleppo П and Ш, similar panoramas spread out against skies of dull gold. This colour faintly echoes the gold-ground panels of the early Renaissance, but it also evokes the fumes and haze of a city on fire. “It’s about the loss of what you know”, Hambling explains. “If I try to put myself in the shoes of someone in Aleppo, then I think of arriving in Ipswich — a place I’ve known since I was a child — and finding that it’s collapsed, gone.” The Aleppo paintings carry echoes of earlier works in which Hambling grappled with international events. In Gulf Women Prepare for War (–), she portrayed Iraqi women training with rocket launchers in a rougepink desert. In the Aleppo paintings, as the single word of the title suggests, the focus is broader — the fate of the city — but no less immediate. In contrast to Gulf Women, the works are not based on particular news photographs. They have taken form in the style of dream images — shaped by footage on television and multiple newspaper images of the city reduced to rubble, its remaining buildings like skeletons. Contemporary art in Britain is routinely criticised for being apolitical, too disengaged from political realities. In the Aleppo series and her other new paintings, Hambling embraces the ‘here and now’. Her engagement is not polemical or moralistic (in the vein of Richard Hamilton’s lamentable Shock and Awe (–) — Tony Blair caricatured as a gun-toting cowboy), but rather a kind of bearing witness and act of comprehending. Her frame of reference is global — encompassing war, death and natural disasters — and yet her works are intimately self-reflexive. Looking out to the world beyond her studio, she places her own response, her own feelings, centre-frame. Raw feeling, often a source of embarrassment for contemporary painters, is the lifeblood of her art. As the curator Bryan Robertson wrote of her works in , “They question us: how much do you care — rather than what do you know, recognize, remember. Above all, what do you feel?”. Hambling calls the Aleppo paintings a “lament”, and a potent mixture of empathy and outrage emanates from the charged surfaces of the pictures, from the paint which flickers between transient visions of disaster and churning, imageless colour. “I think painting has much to do with confrontation”, she explains. “You confront people with something. In Aleppo Ш, you’re confronted by this figure who could be a victim or could be an aggressor. He could be one of the rebels on whose side we were. There’s that ambiguity about which side he’s on.” That act of confrontation is made explicit by the treatment of space in the Aleppo pictures. As in , we sense the artist squaring up to her subject, sizing it up. In the three panoramas of the city, space appears condensed: pulverised buildings and smoke press up against the surface of each picture. They crowd in on the
viewer. This restricted depth of field reflects something of the experience of disaster: time and space boil down to a horrifying singularity. Enhancing the effect of compression, each of the three panoramas is bordered by dark margins painted down the sides of the canvas. Hambling describes these vertical edges as a device for suspending the image: “They’re like old film reels, or the borders on a funeral card, suggesting mourning”, she says. “The whole world is stopped by the darkness and the blackness.” But as much as these edges ‘fix’ the central image of each painting, they equally reinforce its mutability: “As with old rolls of film, there’s also the sense that the image could be revolving, going on all the time”, she continues. Like curtains, then, the edges may be seen as closing in on the image (containing and framing the image), but also as opening to reveal it in all its flux. Each Aleppo picture confronts the disaster in Syria (or, in the case of , the global catastrophes spiralling out of it), and yet each seems to acknowledge the limits of the artist’s (or anyone’s) power to comprehend. The black edges are themselves beginning to dissolve into the painted image. In Aleppo Ш, vast yet insubstantial, the image teeters on the edge of what can be imagined. Just as the dying city is composed of fracturing architecture and outbreaks of smoke, the viewpoint in the picture is splintered: paint mounts up in juddering banks, and we seem to be simultaneously above and beneath the action. In Aleppo Іv, representation itself has given way to an expanse of encrusted black and silver, in the midst of which the golden head of a child flickers like a lost ornament. PORTRAITS
The works in the ‘Edge’ exhibition are part of Hambling’s long-term artistic project — a negotiation between the interior self and the world outside. The Aleppo paintings are psychological and subjective as much as they are documentary. The relationship between self and exterior reality is played out, at the centre of the exhibition, in two self-portraits. Lungs is a literal piece of introspection — the lungs of the artist (a lifelong smoker) depicted as two quivering viscera on a clinical white background. In Hangover, we see her exterior. It is a painting of her head, except that the features have morphed into a confusion of paint. Hambling seems to turn her own image inside out. Hangover is a picture of a feeling rather than a face. In one sense, she conveys the idea of the face as a boundary between outward persona and inward self, as expressed by T.J. Clark in a review of Rembrandt’s portraits, where he writes of “the strangeness of the brain’s everyday, non-horrible externalisation. (What word will do here? ‘Appearance’ is weak, ‘apparatus’ too Cartesian, ‘outlook’ too clever. The cant word ‘interface’ might serve.)” In Hangover, however, Hambling confuses —
even breaches — that interface. The everyday visage has been snarled up, pulped into grey matter. Reality clings to the image in the shape of a cigarette, embedded in the paint. Hangover thereby blurs ‘appearance’ into queasy sensation, with the head of the artist seeming to suck the viewer inwards — just as it sucks on the cigarette — like a vortex. The idea of selfhood as an unstable entity — dually shaped by the world and from within — is examined in Hambling’s other recent portraits. These span different personae — real and fictional, contemporary and historical — and yet all deal with the self as something both firm and dissoluble. The recently-deceased poet and singer Leonard Cohen is the subject of the newest work in the exhibition: gold brushstrokes coalesce loosely in a black space like a filigree bundle, bleeding gold rivulets. Rather than depicting the singer’s appearance, Hambling sought to capture his defining, essential quality — the hypnotic voice. In a nearby portrait, Ludwig van Beethoven is ‘idolised’ (cast as a gold idol) in similar fashion. This masklike representation uses the same gold paint which features prominently throughout the exhibition. For Hambling, the gold is a metaphor for Beethoven’s greatness. In a portrait of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince’s head is a cloud of swirling line and colour. Here the gold is more intermittent and muddled. “But then Hamlet was in a muddle,” Hambling says, “just as we all are.” Made from competing elements of gold, black, flesh tone and grey, Hamlet is a conflicted being, doubtful about his greatness. Like the portraits of Leonard Cohen, Beethoven and Hamlet, Hambling’s recent sculptures — collectively titled Aftermath and begun in — are mercurial creatures. Each Aftermath is based on a chunk of dead wood and has accrued out of layers of plaster and paint, remaining open in form and meaning. (These wood and plaster prototypes were afterwards cast in bronze and painted). Hambling magnifies and modifies the knobbly, split and mottled features of the piece of dead wood; and the works’ titles suggest ways of reading them — attributing roles or identities to them. But they resist finite definition. Depending on the angles they are viewed from, they resemble animals, mummified remains, grimacing faces, gravestones, gargoyles, lumps of meat, clumps of coral, charred relics — or, sometimes, just the old logs from which they first evolved. In Aftermath (Sleeper), for instance, the sidelong image of a face emerges from one angle of the silverygrey object — offering a glimpse of a time-ravaged statue or a fossilised remain. Politician is yet more oblique. A hollow pillar, painted orange and covered with orifices and nodules, it resembles some exotic shell. It is also an elongated face which morphs, at every angle, into an animated contortion of eyes, nostrils and lips. It seems a comic and grotesque caricature —
the politician as an otherworldly mollusc — and it is tempting to equate it with the perma-tan and dewlaps of President Trump, not that Hambling intended it as a specific portrait. The hybrid forms of the Aftermath sculptures are also material hybrids, bringing together most of the media and techniques the artist has utilised during her career — painting, found objects, plaster modelling, bronze casting. Throughout the series, it is also possible to trace many of the divergent themes and emotions that have run through her art from the beginning — death, melancholy, ugliness, or a lyrical kind of absurdism. Occasionally, all these are condensed in a single piece. EDGE
The current exhibition draws its title from a group of paintings of melting icecaps. As with the Aleppo paintings and portraits, the Edge series developed out of an emotional response: “They come from a feeling of fury,” Hambling says, “fury, really, about the fact that we are destroying the planet.” But these works are far from elegiac. To be ‘on the edge’ (even the edge of catastrophe) is also to have one’s senses electrified. In the series of paintings on display, Hambling envisions icecaps — the furthest edges of the world — undergoing slow destruction. Their melting is captured as a beautiful yet inexorable change. In place of the toppling city are plateaus of ice, suspended mid-canvas, which emerge from the sea like the mushroom clouds of atomic bombs. Gravity itself seems to oscillate giddily in these pictures, pulling upwards and downwards as the melting ice sinks and evaporates into the world around it. We witness the gradual, manmade disaster as if through expanded senses — as if on the threshold of a dream. In the Edge paintings, Hambling plays out — in visual form — Henry Miller’s metaphor of waking as a kind of melting of ice. Movement and colour (“a rising mist, glaciers sunk in emerald green”) precede active comprehension. The icecap paintings began in the confines of a sweltering greenhouse on the Isle of Wight. The heat and claustrophobia of the hothouse inspired thoughts of their opposites — glacial expanses, arctic wastes, icebergs the size of islands. Hambling made a series of works on paper, pearlescent seascapes (none bigger than a large postcard) in which clashing forces and forms mingled — heat and cold, mist and clarity, looming topography and panoramic openness. These rapid studies were the basis for the paintings on display at Marlborough. In the Edge paintings, mountains of ice slump into vast, coruscating seas. Skies glow overhead like nebulae in outer space. While depicting melting polar ice, the paintings are also scenes of conflict between the grand, primordial forces of creation myths. Chaos clashes with order, night meets day, glowing ether merges with
solid form. A number of the paintings suggest polar volcanoes, ice-clad yet swelling with heat. In Edge VП, a snowy island rises out of the horizon beneath a canopy of singed orange. The same fiery orange glimmers throughout the image, in the turbid surface of the sea and across the icecap itself, to suggest a geological heat burning beneath the frozen surface of the world. Movement, too, is in opposition. Each painting conveys a dual sense of upward and downward motion — rising vapour, or ice draining away into sea. Streams of paint plunge in rivulets, or conversely appear to rise like plumes of gas or the beams from a yet-hidden sun. Such two-way movement is vividly apparent in the work on paper titled Edge, recently displayed at the British Museum. Here, the dissolving icecap is an island of white acrylic paint on a sea of black paper. Red and white brushstrokes erupt from the central mass, pursuing and overriding one another like lava streams. Yet the explosive brushstrokes that seem to course down the paper can equally be perceived as an upsurge of energy and heat: “That earth-red colour became a necessity”, Hambling has remarked, “because it is like fire rising, the heat underneath destroying the frozen surface.” In the process of making the Edge paintings, Hambling found that by turning the canvases repeatedly upside down — Filled with ambivalent forcing sea and sky to swap places movement, the Edge — the images gradually resolved. Filled with ambivalent movement, paintings are characterised the Edge paintings are characterised by an underlying interaction by an underlying interaction between between order and destruction, order and destruction, a coherent a coherent world and a world world and a world turned on its head. In this there lies a metaphor for the turned on its head. In this act of painting. The Edge paintings there lies a metaphor for are not simply representations of the the act of painting. polar icecaps; each image of a melting iceberg is also an exploration of painting’s oscillations between representational form and the raw materiality. Hambling’s paint describes — and also enacts — a metamorphosis. Each dissolving iceberg is poised between hard delineation and something inchoate, watery, and elusive. In Edge VІ, for instance, the hard white clumps are falling into a downward torrent. These same oppositions were played out in her Wall of Water paintings (–), the immediate precursors to the Edge series, in which gigantic waves were depicted erupting over a sea wall. And yet Hambling also regards the melting icecaps as a reversal of that earlier group: “The Wall of Water paintings are about nature challenging an insubstantial manmade sea wall. But in the paintings of melting icecaps, it’s about man destroying nature — a reversal of the roles: the destructive force of man over the planet.” As in the Aleppo pictures, Hambling has introduced cinematic ‘sidebars’ to each Edge painting. These have
a stabilising, stilling effect: they shore up against the vertiginous movement in the centre of each painting. They also draw attention to the fact that each painting is, at heart, a formalist construction, however mercurial or spontaneous. Throughout the series, the sea and sky are symmetrical Rothkoesque panels bisected by a central dissolving mass. (Some of Rothko’s early works themselves had vertical ‘sidebars’, hemming in the central blocks of colour — for instance Untitled (Violet, black, orange, yellow on white and red), . His painting Interior, , depicted the panels and pilasters of a classical interior — real architectural forms which prefigure the formalist architecture of his later paintings). Hambling reminds us that looking is an act of structuring and framing: time and experience are enclosed within a field of view. GHOST
In Ghost, the transformations found throughout the artist’s recent works assume corporeal — or virtually corporeal — shape. Suspended between materialisation and disappearance, the inscrutable face in this painting may be seen as a personification of all the works in the exhibition. The countenance is insistent and looming, seeming to harden into being before our eyes, and yet (as the title reminds us) it is as thin as air, a mere ghost, not really there. Who is the ghost? He or she (gender, too, is balanced on a knife-edge) began as a portrait of Beethoven, but has since moved through several different identities, including the artist herself and finally her mother. The apparition is the equivalent, in painting, of the mythic figure of Proteus, who slides between different forms — a bearded lion, a snake, a leopard, a boar, rushing water, a leafy tree — so as to evade capture. Like the mercurial god of classical myth, Hambling’s work reinvents itself restlessly — as throughout her career — refusing to be pinned down as it forges forward. James Cahill is a writer and critic. He has contributed to publications including Art in America, Apollo, The Burlington Magazine, Elephant, The Erotic Review, frieze, the TLS and The White Review. He is the author and co-author of monographs including Richard Patterson (Anomie Publishing, 2017), Maggi Hambling: War Requiem and Aftermath (London: Unicorn Press, 2015), and Angus Fairhurst (London: Sadie Coles HQ / PWP, 2009). He is completing a PhD at Cambridge University on the relationship between contemporary British art and classical antiquity. Other current projects include an anthology of interviews with contemporary artists, due next year from Laurence King Publishing.
1. Aleppo I 2016 oil on canvas 91 x 122 cm.
2. Aleppo Ð&#x; 2016 oil on canvas 91 x 122 cm.
3. Aleppo ле 2016 oil on canvas 183 x 213 cm.
4. Aleppo IV 2016 oil on canvas 162 x 134.5 cm.
5. 2016 2016 oil on canvas 213 x 183 cm.
6. Beethoven 2016 oil on canvas 86 x 71 cm.
7. Hamlet 2015 oil on canvas 170 x 122 cm.
8. Lungs 2016 oil on canvas 41 x 51 cm.
9. Hangover 2016 oil and cigarette on canvas 53 x 43 cm.
10. Ghost 2016 oil on canvas 152 x 122 cm.
11. Leonard Cohen 2016–17 oil on canvas 152 x 122 cm.
12. Edge I 2014 oil on canvas 198 x 226 cm.
13. Edge ле 2015 oil on canvas 183 x 213 cm.
14. Edge П 2014–15 oil on canvas 274 x 91 cm.
15. Edge V 2015–16 oil on canvas 137 x 170 cm.
16. Edge VI 2016 oil on canvas 122 x 91 cm.
17. Edge IV 2015–16 oil on canvas 91 x 122 cm.
18. Edge VП 2015–16 oil on canvas 91 x 122 cm.
19. Edge Vле 2016 oil on canvas 198 x 226 cm.
20. Survivor 2014 bronze primed and hand coloured h27 x w20 x d20 cm.
21. Homunculus 2013 bronze primed and hand coloured h32 x w27 x d12 cm.
22. Oil spill 2013 bronze primed and hand coloured h22 x w16 x d20 cm.
23. Cull 2015 bronze primed and hand coloured h30 x w25 x d21 cm.
24. Atrophied bird 2016 bronze primed and hand coloured h16 x w37 x d24 cm.
25. Hunger (work in progress) 2016 bronze primed and hand coloured h37 x w36 x d16 cm.
26. Sleeper 2013 bronze primed and hand coloured h18 x w28 x d24 cm.
27. Politician 2015 bronze primed and hand coloured h38 x w21 x d22 cm.
List of Works
1. Aleppo I 2016 oil on canvas 91 x 122 cm. 2. Aleppo лЪ 2016 oil on canvas 91 x 122 cm. 3. Aleppo ле 2016 oil on canvas 183 x 213 cm. 4. Aleppo IV 2016 oil on canvas 162 x 134.5 cm. 5. 2016 2016 oil on canvas 213 x 183 cm. 6. Beethoven 2016 oil on canvas 86 x 71 cm. 7. Hamlet 2015 oil on canvas 170 x 122 cm. 8. Lungs 2016 oil on canvas 41 x 51 cm. 9. Hangover 2016 oil and cigarette on canvas 53 x 43 cm.
10. Ghost
19. Edge VШ
2016 oil on canvas 152 x 122 cm.
2016 oil on canvas 198 x 226 cm.
11. Leonard Cohen
20. Survivor
2016–17 oil on canvas 152 x 122 cm.
2014 bronze primed and hand coloured h27 x w20 x d20 cm.
12. Edge I
21. Homunculus
2014 oil on canvas 198 x 226 cm.
2013 bronze primed and hand coloured h32 x w27 x d12 cm.
13. Edge Ш
22. Oil spill
2015 oil on canvas 183 x 213 cm.
2013 bronze primed and hand coloured h22 x w16 x d20 cm.
14. Edge П
23. Cull
2014–15 oil on canvas 274 x 91 cm.
2015 bronze primed and hand coloured h30 x w25 x d21 cm.
15. Edge V
24. Atrophied bird
2015–16 oil on canvas 137 x 170 cm.
2016 bronze primed and hand coloured h16 x w37 x d24 cm.
16. Edge VI
25. Hunger (work in progress)
2016 oil on canvas 122 x 91 cm.
2016 bronze primed and hand coloured h37 x w36 x d16 cm.
17. Edge IV
26. Sleeper
2015–16 oil on canvas 91 x 122 cm.
2013 bronze primed and hand coloured h18 x w28 x d24 cm.
18. Edge VП
27. Politician
2015–16 oil on canvas 91 x 122 cm.
2015 bronze primed and hand coloured h38 x w21 x d22 cm.
Maggi Hambling Biography Born Suffolk 1945
Exhibitions
Studied
1967 Paintings and Drawings, Hadleigh Gallery, Suffolk
1960 With Arthur Lett-Haines and Cedric Morris, Benton End, Hadleigh, Suffolk
1973 Paintings and Drawings, Morley College Gallery, London
1962–4 Ipswich School of Art
1977 New Oil Paintings, Warehouse Gallery, London
1964–7 Camberwell School of Art 1967–9 Slade School of Art
1981 Drawings and Paintings on View, National Gallery, London
Awards
1983 Pictures of Max Wall, National Portrait Gallery, London and tour
1969 Boise Travel Award, New York 1977 Arts Council Award
1987 Maggi Hambling, Serpentine Gallery, London and tour
1980–1 First Artist in Residence, National Gallery, London
1988 Moments of the Sun, Arnolfini, Bristol and tour
1995 Jerwood Painting Prize (with Patrick Caulfield)
1991 An Eye Through a Decade, Yale Center for British Art, Newhaven, Connecticut
Created obe
1992 The Jemma Series, monotypes, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
2005 Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture for Scallop
1993 Dragon Morning, works in clay, cca Galleries, London
2010 Created cbe
1993–4 Towards Laughter, Maggi Hambling, Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Sunderland and tour
Books 2001 John Berger, Maggi and Henrietta: Drawings of Henrietta Moraes by Maggi Hambling, Bloomsbury, London Father, facsimile of the sketchbook in the British Museum, Morley College Gallery, London 2006 Maggi Hambling, The Works and Conversations with Andrew Lambirth, Unicorn Press, London 2009 George Always, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool You Are the Sea, Lux Books, Suffolk The Sea, Lowry Press, Salford 2010 The Aldeburgh Scallop, Full Circle Editions, Suffolk 2015 War Requiem and Aftermath, Maggi Hambling and James Cahill, Unicorn Press, London 2016 Touch: works on paper, Jennifer Ramkalawon, Lund Humphries, London
1996 Sculpture in Bronze, Marlborough Fine Art, London 1997 A Matter of Life and Death, Bothy Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, West Yorkshire A Statue for Oscar Wilde, National Portrait Gallery, London Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin 1998 A conversation with Oscar Wilde, unveiled Adelaide Street, London, facing Charing Cross Station 2000 Good Friday, Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, Suffolk 2001 Henrietta Moraes by Maggi Hambling, Marlborough Fine Art, London Father, Morley College Gallery, London
2003 The Very Special Brew Series, Sotheby’s, London North Sea Paintings, Snape Maltings Concert Hall Gallery, Suffolk Scallop, a sculpture to celebrate Benjamin Britten, unveiled Aldeburgh, Suffolk 2006 Portraits of People and the Sea, Marlborough Fine Art, London 2007 No Straight Lines, Octagon Gallery, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Victoria Art Gallery, Bath; Abbot Hall, Kendal Waves and Waterfalls, Abbot Hall, Kendal 2008 Waves and Waterfalls, Marlborough Fine Art, London 2009 George Always – Portraits of George Melly by Maggi Hambling, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; National Portrait Gallery, London The Sea – Paintings by L S Lowry and Maggi Hambling, The Lowry, Salford, Manchester 2010 Maggi Hambling – The Wave, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge New Sea Sculpture, Marlborough Fine Art, London 2010–1 Objects in Mind, Freud Museum, London 2012 You are the Sea, installation, snap (Art at the Aldeburgh Festival) 2013 War Requiem, installation, snap purchased for Aldeburgh Music by the Monument Trust The Resurrection Spirit, unveiled St Dunstan’s Church, Mayfield, East Sussex The Winchester Tapestries, installed Winchester Cathedral Wall of Water, The Hermitage, St Petersburg, ussr 2014 Walls of Water, National Gallery, London 2015 War Requiem and Aftermath, Cultural Institute at King’s College, Somerset House, London 2016–7 Maggi Hambling: Touch, The British Museum, London
Selected Public Collections Aldeburgh Music Arts Council, England Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Australian National Gallery, Canberra Birmingham City Art Gallery British Council British Museum Castle Museum, Norwich Chelmsford and Essex Museum Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich Contemporary Art Society Eastern Arts Collection Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, Suffolk Government Art Collection Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston Hartlebury Castle, Worcestershire Hereford Cathedral Imperial War Museum, London Jerwood Foundation National Gallery, London National Portrait Gallery, London Reading Museum Royal Free Hospital, London Rugby Collection Ruth Borchard Collection of Self Portraits St Mary’s Church, Hadleigh, Suffolk Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh Southampton Art Gallery Swindon Museum and Art Gallery Tate, London The Ivy, London The Minories, Colchester Usher Gallery, Lincoln Victoria and Albert Museum, London Wakefield Art Gallery Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Winchester Cathedral Yale Center for British Art, Newhaven, Connecticut
Marlborough
London
New York
Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd 6 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4BY Telephone: +44 (0)20 7629 5161 Telefax: +44 (0)20 7629 6338 mfa@marlboroughfineart.com info@marlboroughgraphics.com www.marlboroughlondon.com
Marlborough Gallery Inc. 40 West 57th Street New York, N.Y. 10019 Telephone: +1 212 541 4900 Telefax: +1 212 541 4948 mny@marlboroughgallery.com www.marlboroughgallery.com
Marlborough Contemporary 6 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4BY Telephone: +44 (0)20 7629 5161 Telefax: +44 (0)20 7629 6338 info@marlboroughcontemporary.com www.marlboroughlondon.com Madrid Galería Marlborough SA Orfila 5 28010 Madrid Telephone: +34 91 319 1414 Telefax: +34 91 308 4345 info@galeriamarlborough.com www.galeriamarlborough.com
Marlborough Chelsea 545 West 25th Street New York, N.Y. 10001 Telephone: +1 212 463 8634 Telefax: +1 212 463 9658 chelsea@marlboroughgallery.com Barcelona Marlborough Barcelona Enric Granados, 68 08008 Barcelona. Telephone: +34 93 467 4454 Telefax: +34 93 467 4451 infobarcelona@galeriamarlborough.com www.galeriamarlborough.com
Portrait of the artist and all photography by Douglas Atfield Design: Stocks Taylor Benson | Print: Impress Print Services ISBN 978-1-909707-36-8 | Catalogue No. 663 | © 2017 Marlborough Inside covers: Detail from Aleppo Ш, 2016 and Edge VШ, 2016