Born in Sudbury, Suffolk in 1945, British painter and sculptor Maggi Hambling CBE first studied locally at Cedric Morris’ and Lett Haines’ East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, before going to the Ipswich (1962-64), Camberwell (1964-67) and Slade (1967-69) Schools of Art. In 1980 she was appointed as the first contemporary artist in residence at the National Gallery and in 1995 awarded (jointly with Patrick Caulfield) the Jerwood Prize for Painting.
b. 1945
Maggi Hambling CBE.
Hambling has had numerous solo museum exhibitions since 1980, and besides those at the National Gallery (1981 & 2014) and the National Portrait Gallery (1983 & 2009), others have included, Serpentine Gallery (1987), Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA (1991), Yorkshire Sculpture park (1997), Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal (2007), The Lowry, Salford (2009), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2009), Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2010), The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia (2013), Somerset House (2015), The British Museum, London (2016) Jerwood Gallery (2018) and, most recently, two important retrospectives at both CAFA Art Museum, Beijing and Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China (2019).
Public sculpture includes A conversation with Oscar Wilde, unveiled Adelaide Street, London, facing Charing Cross Station (1998), Scallop, a sculpture to celebrate the composer Benjamin Britten, unveiled Aldeburgh Beach, Suffolk (2003), The Brixton Heron, unveiled Brixton, London (2010) and, most recently, A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft, unveiled Newington Green, London (2020).
Hambling’s installations You are the sea and War Requiem were shown at SNAP (Art at the Aldeburgh Festival) in 2012 and 2013. War Requiem was subsequently purchased by the Monument Trust for Snape Maltings where it is shown annually.
“I’m always braced,” she said this weekend. “As Oscar Wilde said, when critics are divided the artist is at one with himself.”