Maggi Hambling
“Real time”
New York, 545 West 25th Street
Hambling has been a prominent and controversial figure in the United Kingdom for over fifty years and will be presenting here a significant body of work from the past decade. With a well-documented voice of social engagement, Hambling joins a long history of groundbreaking exhibitions supported by Marlborough including Juan Genovés (1967) and Philip Guston (1970). Embracing the social and political situations in which her paintings are produced, and the vacillations between figurative and abstract readings, her new paintings rhetorically perform as figures of speech. Her most recent Edge paintings, made on tall canvases reminiscent of Chinese ink scrolls, depict mountains and polar wastes through bold accumulations of indigo and white, to suggest an internal–psychological–wilderness as much as a physical setting. In a sequence of smaller paintings, wild animals are realized in states of movement or flux—alive with predatory energy, wracked with torment, or edging slowly towards death. Close in appearance to ink drawings, these works combine empathy with outrage. Her challenge is to provoke the viewer’s participation in the construction of meaning—where meaning accumulates in the process of viewing.
Rhino without horn, 2019 oil on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Gallery
Featured on the second floor will be a group of paintings from Hambling’s acclaimed Wall of water (2010-2012) cycle. These large-scale works, depicting explosions of water inspired by the experience of watching waves crash into a concrete sea wall, were created in the wake of the death of a close friend. Conveying a dual sense of aliveness and disintegration, they resonate with the works of painters as diverse as Twombly and Bacon. The Wall of water paintings were first shown at the National Gallery, London, in 2014. At the time, Hambling commented, “I feel younger now than I ever did when I was young. I seem to be painting more freely…I’m trying to paint death with as much life as I can.”
