MAGGI HAMBLING: ORIGINS Exhibitions

ORIGINS, a new exhibition at the recently
transformed Gainsborough’s House, spans six decades of Hambling’s work, bearing witness to the artist’s deep connection with Suffolk and inviting a meditation on the universal relationships between self and environment, people and place.

Exhibited in the new galleries designed by ZMMA architects and comprised of around 30 works, the paintings and drawings in ORIGINS express a combination of exterior reality and interior life. Portrayals of people and places carry a sense of longer time: the unfolding of life, the workings of memory, the evolution of love, and the inescapable proximity of life to death – a theme that recurs throughout Hambling’s art. Suffolk links the artist’s early and present lives – she was born in Sudbury in 1945, she grew up in Hadleigh and has lived in rural Suffolk since the late 1990s.

The artist first visited the home of Thomas Gainsborough at age ten: “It was the first place that I registered real art. I remember his cows and trees – that was the first time I looked at an oil painting and was taken to another place”. The earliest work in the show, Rosie the rhino (1963), was made when she was a student at Ipswich School of Art. The drawing shows the head and shoulders of a stuffed rhinoceros in the local museum, its eyes confronting the viewer from either side of a blade-like horn. Depicted in black ink, the creature is simultaneously animate and dead, both a literal specimen and a memento mori: “It was my first portrait and the first time I used ink. Although Rosie was dead, there was a definite interaction between her and me.”

In its sense of dual presence and absence, the ink drawing has much in common with recent self-portraits in which Hambling squares up to her own mortality. We see her alternately as a sentient presence, meeting the viewer’s eye, and as a blank silhouette. A recent and blackly comic portrait of Hambling in her coffin is reminiscent of a baby in a crib. Throughout the exhibition, origins carry a contrary sense of endpoints or conclusions.

Several works point back to Hambling’s experience as a fifteen-year-old at East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing – the avant-garde establishment run by artists Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. Characters from her past and present lives intermingle – portraits of Morris and her mentor Lett-Haines (made variously from life or memory) appear alongside those of friends such as fellow artists Sarah Lucas and Julian Simmons – also residents of Suffolk – and of the artist’s partner, Tory Lawrence. Images of her parents signal the most fundamental ‘origin’ of all. A recent portrait of Hambling’s mother from memory is also an oblique self- portrait – the difference between the two is expressed by a smear of pink lipstick, such as Hambling has never worn.

The Suffolk landscape is an integral aspect of the exhibition: Wall of water I (2010) and Early morning sea (2013) are both examples of her long-running series of depictions of the North Sea off the Suffolk coast (a work from the Wall of water series entered the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York last year). Half the works in the exhibition are on view for the first time. Recent paintings evoke vacant skies and flocking birds. Depictions of her environment mirror the moods and contradictions of her portraits: life and death, exhilaration and elegy, are held in taut balance. A portrait of the artist’s father from memory began as a picture of mist over the water meadows around her Suffolk studio.

The exhibition will also feature Hambling’s installation, You Are the Sea (2012), a work that embodies the interplay of ‘local’ and ‘universal’. A deep sluice well at Thorpeness in Suffolk has been reconstructed as a sculptural object out of which a soundtrack emanates, combining rumbling sluice water with strange, primordial vocals, conjuring a sense of deep time while also reflecting the artist’s everyday existence.

Mark Bills, Director, Gainsborough’s House, says: “Thomas Gainsborough and Maggi Hambling were both born in Sudbury. Although over two centuries apart, following our transformational refurbishment, visitors to Gainsborough’s House are now able to see both historical masterpieces and contemporary art by these two great Sudbury born artists. We are delighted to be showing works by Maggi Hambling – an international icon who continues the rich artistic legacy of Suffolk and shows how contemporary artists continue to be inspired by the beauty of its landscape and cultural heritage.”

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