No Straight Lines: Waves and Waterfalls

Location: Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria LA9 5AL
Date: 6th November - 21st December 2007

Maggi Hambling’s work is represented by Marlborough Fine Art, London, with whom Abbott Hall Art Gallery has worked to present this solo exhibition. Click on Abbot Hall Art Gallery for opening times and other information.

Amidst the loud clamour for attention that is the currency of much fashionably sensational art, Hambling’s drawings and paintings have reached challenging new heights of meaning. (Pictured is a study for Frances Rose, 1973).

“Drawing is an artist’s most direct and intimate response to the world. The touch of charcoal, graphite or ink on paper is full of endless possibilities. I try to distill the essence of a subject and capture the life force of a moment.”
Maggi Hambling October 2007

The artist sees “no straight lines” in any part of nature she is moved to draw: people animals or the sea. Through a potent language of marks her work achieves a unique life-force. The exhibition included memorable portraits of John Berger, Stephen Fry, and Max Wall from life, Oscar Wilde from imagination, Hambling’s mother from memory, and from life and death both her father and her lover Henrietta Moraes.

In 2003 Scallop, Hambling’s controversial sculpture to celebrate Benjamin Britten was unveiled on Aldeburgh beach, Suffolk. In the pause between making the maquette and beginning work on the actual piece, Hambling began her now famous series of North Sea Paintings. The restless movement of the sea continues to obsess the artist and has never been so powerfully or physically expressed as in these recent paintings.

In contrast to the predominantly horizontal rhythm of the sea paintings there were the first works in a series of monumental waterfalls which were seen in public for the first time at Abbot Hall. Three of these brand new works towered the full height of the gallery walls, literally cascading from ceiling to floor.

Human and animal activity can be discovered within all these multi-layered works. Life, and its inescapable bed-fellow death, are finely balanced in the action and energy of paint in these confrontational images.

An exciting new series of monoprints which captured waves and waterfalls on a smaller scale had their first showing in this exhibition.

"No Straight Lines" formed the first part of this exhibition tour organised by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and Marlborough Fine Art, London, in collaboration with the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath and Abbot Hall Art Gallery. These works on paper have been selected from a variety of sources, including loans from the Ashmolean Museum, British Museum, Tate, private collections and the artist herself. An illustrated catalogue of the drawings accompanied the exhibition. In addition Abbot Hall extended the exhibition to include some of Hambling’s latest paintings: of Waves and Waterfalls, which came directly from her studio to be shown for the first time.

created on 2007-07-04 19:40:57 by iapmag

Selection Previous Exhibitions:

No Straight Lines: Waves and Waterfalls