Thomas Brambilla Gallery is proud to present Maggi Hambling first solo show in Italy, which opens on Saturday October 9th, 2021 at 6:30 pm.

Maggi Hambling (b. 1945) is one of Europe’s leading contemporary figurative artists, celebrated bothfor her paintings of people, the sea, melting polar ice-caps, environmental destruction and was zones, and for her public sculptures, including A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft unveiled in London in 2020, and the monumental Scallop, for the composer Benjamin Britten, on Aldeburgh Beach, Suffolk.

This exhibition presents a series of recent portraits, the largest of which is a self-portrait from 2018 where the artist materializes out of jumbled letters and cyphers, while in the parallel canvas, a black rectangle of an unpainted canvas hovers accusingly within the clutter of the studio. Both artist and painting appear in a reciprocal condition of incompleteness, as if – by some inevitable pact – one must make the other. Nothing is more doubtful, more subject to change, the painting appears to suggest, than certainty itself.

Bearing witness is – and always has been, for Hambling – a matter of looking inwards, of measuring herown responses as much as documenting what she sees and has seen. Important figures from Hambling’spast are portrayed, including her mentor the artist Lett Haines who died in 1978 and the artist Francis Bacon whose face dissolves in laughter, albeit a double-edged laughter in the dark, a maniac and uncontrolled release of energy.

A series of smaller portraits condense their subjects with rapid, gestural marks clinging to a white ground. Within these turbulent formations of paint, looser, more abstracted images emanate anemotional sincerity that springs from the artist’s continuing engagement with life in the here and now.These portraits transmit double moods of humor and doubt, anger and joy, aliveness and mortality. Such doubleness – and accommodation of seeming opposites – is a hallmark of the artist’s work and has beenfor half a century. Out of incongruity and contradiction, Maggi Hambling finds a means of confronting truths and achieving a realness that in contemporary art feels increasingly rare.
Maggi Hambling (b. Sudbury, Suffolk 1945) is a British painter and sculptor much celebrated in her home country of Britain, and increasingly visible globally. Hambling studied first 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 invited to be the first artist
to have a contemporary artist in residence in the National Gallery, London.
Hambling has enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions since 1980, including two solo exhibitions at The National Gallery in London, in 1981 and 2014 respectively; solo exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in 1983 and 2009. Other significant exhibitions have included The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (1981), the Yorkshire Sculpture park (1997), Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal (2007), The Lowry, Salford (2009), Walker Arts Gallery, Liverpool (2009), The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2010), Winchester Cathedral (2013), The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (2013), Somerset House (2015), The British Museum, London (2016) The Jerwood Gallery (2018) and CAFA Art Museum, Beijing (2019).