Press Corner

Melly, Fry and Hambling at IAP Fine Art prints' launch

Press Enquiries

If you are a member of the press and you need print-quality images of Maggi Hambling or her work, or would like to receive press releases/information about the artist's forthcoming exhibitions or events, please contact FMCM Associates giving the name of your publication, copy deadline, and telephone number on +44 0207 405 7422 or email Annabel Robinson: annabelr@fmcm.co.uk

Alternatively, you can also contact us and we will respond as swiftly as possible.

Selected Reviews

The Art of Dying BBC4 30th September 2009

Study from Life: My Mother Dead, 1988

In an intimate and moving documentary, art historian Dan Cruickshank confronts the unavoidable issue of his own certain death, whether soon or far in the future. His mission, in this largely secular age, is to see if art can offer either comfort or explanation in the face of the greatest unknown of all. Maggi Hambling is interviewed in the programme. For further information, or to watch on BBC iPlayer, please click 'The Art of Dying'

Time Out, London

In Time Out (June 24th 2009 issue) There is a long interview of Maggi Hambling by Helen Sumpter about her current exhibition 'George Always' at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

The Spectator Magazine

'Escape from reality' by Andrew Lambirth

Melly’s bulk looms large in these remarkable paintings, most of them executed after his death in 2007. Hambling first met him at a party in 1980 and they soon became firm friends and partners in subversion. Both enjoyed performing and being outrageous, both were utterly serious about art. In 1998, Hambling was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint Melly, and the result is the first exhibit in this show. She painted George in triplicate: in drag as Bessie Smith, on his feet performing, and seated in the robes of an Honorary Fellow. It’s a powerful portrayal, so full of life that it bursts out of the canvas, the paint-marks extending on to the frame at salient points.
For the full article click here.

BBC Radio 3: Night Waves

Artist Maggi Hambling discussed John Constable's portraits, the focus of a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Celebrated for his landscape paintings such as The Hay Wain, Constable's work as a portrait painter is far less well-known and, in fact, he produced more than 100 during his career. Hambling - now best-known for her controversial scallop sculpture dedicated to Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh, and her memorial to Oscar Wilde in central London - talked about this less-explored part of Constable's work and discussed her own portraits - particularly of the jazz musician George Melly.

To go to BBC Radio 3's webpage click here.

George Always: Maggi makes Melly with her old friend - Times Online

Hambling loves fun, expeditions, drink, transvestite cabaret, laughter, gossip and parties, but always at the top of the stairs in her large, bare attic studio her daemon is waiting for her. To snare it in paint - to use brushes, rags and fingers to give it shape and force it to show its face - is her mission. She gets up at five every morning to paint the sea near her Suffolk house. She was born to fight the dragon and rise to the challenge of making a laugh resound in paint, an obsession of hers.

For full text please see George Always: Times Online

The Observer: Jane Bown's Photo Archive

Maggi Hambling and George Melly in The Observer

Recently reviewed in the Observer, this photograph was taken during a break in a portrait session when the late writer and musician George Melly was sitting for his friend, the artist Maggi Hambling.

Free spirit: Maggi Hambling on art, taboos and political correctness

The Big Interview by Christina Patterson, The Independent

George Always: Portraits of George Melly by Maggi Hambling is at the Walker Arts Gallery, Liverpool, 27 February to 31 May

George Melly Singing by Maggi Hambling

"Gazing at the paintings in the catalogue on the bus to Hambling's south London home, I actually gasped. Here, in the studio, they give me gooseflesh. They feel, in a way, like the climax of Hambling's career so far. The artist who produced deeply compassionate portraits of old men and women in pubs, and see-straight-to-the-core ones of people like Max Wall, Derek Jarman and Stephen Fry, and moving drawings and paintings of her father on his deathbed, and of her great love, Henrietta Moraes, on hers, and sculptures of strange creatures and lips and laughs, and landscapes, and seascapes, and sunsets and sunrises, seems to have produced a series of paintings in which all these things meld and ebb and flow together, in a celebration of art, a celebration of life." Extract from The Independent. For full article click here

Maggi Hambling's Fine Art prints of Derek Jarman, George Melly and Sephen Fry as well as selected works such as sunrises & sunsets, laughs and drawings are currently on display at IAP Fine Art, London.

The Times - John Moores Painting Prize. Seven leading artists, including Maggi Hambling, reveal the secrets of their work in The Times.

Francis Bacon Henrietta Moraes 1966

Tuesday 9 September 2008 - Maggi Hambling was interviewed about the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain on BBC Radio 4's 'Front Row', the live magazine programme on the world of arts, literature, film, media and music.

Scallop

Maggi Hambling was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 'Broadcast House' programme at 9am on Sunday 20th July concerning her paintings & sculpture inspired by the North Sea.

Maggi Hambling's 'Scallop' plus interview with the artist was featured on television on The One Show, BBC1 Monday 10th March at 7pm.

Battle of Britten rages on the Beach

It was designed to honour the composer. But after a four-year campaign of attacks, the sculpture's future is now in doubt. Click article's title to view article.

Caroline Davies
Sunday January 6, 2008
The Observer

'Lunch With the FT: Maggi Hambling'
To read this interview over lunch with The Financial Times' journalist Rebecca Rose (published 8th January 2008. Click the title of article above to read.

'A Life In Pictures' an interview with Maggi Hambling by Lynn Barber in The Observer 2nd December 2007.
To view please click here: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2220326,00.html

The Spectator 10th February 2007, 'Time is eating away at one's life', article by Andrew Lambirth
"I’m talking to Maggi Hambling in the downstairs studio of her south London home, because her beautifully light upstairs painting space is being given a new coat of white paint, the first for years. She always says that if she ever comes to sell this house the agents can market it as having ‘four reception rooms, two bathrooms and a ballroom. No bedrooms’. It’s a misleading description of the Hambling lifestyle: work is the order of the day, not partying, and the ballroom is of course the main studio. Hambling is not out on the tiles every night, but is more likely to retire to bed early in order to rise before dawn. She got into the habit when she was obsessively painting the sunrise in the 1980s; these days, her subject is primarily the North Sea, where it meets that bit of the Suffolk coastline Hambling has known all her life, around Aldeburgh and Thorpeness.

She owns a cottage near Saxmundham set in a large expanse of water meadow. Whenever she’s there, she gets up early to draw the sea, before anyone else is about. ‘When I began the sea pictures in November 2003, I would just look at what was in front of me. Empty myself and try to take the subject in, and then go back and work from memory......."

4th February 2007: Sunday Times Magazine, Sue Fox interviewed Maggi Hambling for the regular feature 'A Life In A Day'. MH: "When I painted George Melly, he said I would come round the corner of the canvas like an escaped mink. He could tell if it was going well because otherwise I'd stamp my foot in fury. I'd have loved to have painted Christ. I'd have loved the chance to paint Oscar Wilde...."

1st February 2007: Country Life magazine said of Maggi Hambling: * 'No Straight Lines' at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.....confirms her place as a draughtsman of distinction, and should not be missed.'*

In rave reviews for her recent sell-out exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art and the monograph MAGGI HAMBLING THE WORKS and Conversations with Andrew Lambirth (published January 2006, Unicorn Press), Maggi Hambling was said to have “succeeded where Leonardo failed” (Brian Sewell, Evening Standard) and was referred to as “the female Bacon” (The Art Newspaper).