Maggi Hambling

Born Sudbury 1945

Maggi Hambling’s reputation was formed by a major series of portraits of the celebrated British comedian Max Wall, produced while she was the first Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London, and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in 1983. The vivid observation in numerous paintings and charcoal sketches encapsulated her direct and committed engagement with her subject, interpreted in dynamic and bravura impressions. In the mid-1980s she turned to landscape painting, made in her native Suffolk. Her studies of dawn in the Orwell Estuary recall the luminous visions of the 19th Century English masters J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. In works from the early 1990s a violent symbolism disturbs dreamlike compostitions; whirlpools of primal colour revolve around the image of a fractured moon in elegies of spectral radiance. Hambling not only worked from life and the model but also drew on memory and her subconscious imagination to escape the limits of documentary realism. Tate Collection