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Maggi Hambling

Born 1945, Hadleigh, Suffolk.

Maggi Hambling devoted nine years to training for her career as painter, sculptor and printmaker, starting in 1960 with Arthur Lett-Haines and Cedric Morris at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. She went on to Ipswich School of Art from 1962-64 and then Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts from 1964-67. From 1967-69 she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, winning a Boise Travel Award to New York in 1969.

Solo exhibitions in Suffolk and London during the late 1960s and 1970s paved the way for an appointment as the first Artist-in-Residence at the National Gallery on 1980/81 which was to establish her status as a significant figure in British art. During the residence she produced a series of portraits of the comedian and actor Max Wall which were subsequently shown at the National Portrait Gallery in 1983. The exhibition consisted of twenty-three drawings and fifteen paintings and was acclaimed as a unique and perceptive insight into the man and facets of the tragi-comic personas he inhabited in performance. Later subjects for her portraits include Derek Jarman, Francis Bacon, A J P Taylor, John Berger, Steven Fry and George Melly.

Prominent among her sculptural commissions are the first public memorial to Oscar Wilde, sited in Adelaide Street, London, near Trafalgar Square and Scallop a memorial to Benjamin Britten installed on the beach at Aldeburgh in Suffolk.

The landscape and the sea have also featured prominently as subjects in Hambling’s paintings, notably a series of North Sea paintings which through in her energetic, bravura style of painting powerfully evoke the violence and drama of the waves she observes on the North Sea coast. The most recent exhibition on this theme was Walls of Water at the National Gallery in 2014.

Hambling is represented in most of the major public art collections in the UK.



Heron
Portrait of Dr. Clarke Brundin