Maggi Hambling, the first National Gallery Artist in Residence (1980–81), has established a reputation over the last four decades as one of Britain’s most significant and controversial painters and sculptors. This autumn she returns to exhibit at Trafalgar Square for the first time in almost 35 years with a brand new series of paintings – Walls of Water.
Hambling brings rare intensity and energy to her timeless medium, continually advancing the language of oil paint. The waves, poised between animation and disintegration, speak at a fundamental level of the cycle of life and death: flickering ghosts of people and animals appear and disappear within them.