One of Britain’s foremost figurative contemporary artists, Maggi Hambling works across all media, in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and installation. She has stated that the challenge in her work is to touch the subject with all the desire of a lover. Public sculptures, such as A Conversation with Oscar Wilde (1998, facing Charing Cross Station, London), Scallop (2003, Aldeburgh Beach, Suffolk) and most recently A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft (2020, Newington Green, London) have attracted controversy and praise in equal measure.

Born in Suffolk in 1945, M. Hambling studied with the artists Arthur Lett-Haines (1894-1978) and Cedric Morris (1889-1982), and later at Ipswich School of Art (1962-1964) where aged 17 she produced a remarkable ink drawing of a stuffed rhino in the local museum. Further studies in London, at Camberwell School of Art (1964-1967) and the Slade School of Fine Art (1967-1969) gave M. Hambling a rigorous training in drawing (she draws first thing every day) and the freedom to experiment with conceptual art. However, she soon returned to painting, displaying a deep empathy with her sitters, as demonstrated in her early portraits from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. A significant highpoint in M. Hambling’s career occurred in 1980 when she was appointed the first Artist-in-Residence at the National Gallery, London. A fervent admirer of the old masters, especially Rembrandt (1606-1669), this role gave her privileged access to study the paintings at close quarters.

In the 1990s M. Hambling’s muse was Henrietta Moraes, a former model of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) and legendary ‘Queen of Soho’. When she died the artist made drawings of H. Moraes in her coffin; she also drew her own parents after they had died. This practice of re-creating a loved one after death began with drawings of her teacher C. Morris and continues with one of her recent works Lipstick (2019), a portrait of her deceased mother.

A large white plaster sculpture, Henrietta Eating a Meringue (2001) is among the artist’s most important works. In it, she incorporates elements of portraiture and the sea; the latter would prove to be a subject that would preoccupy the artist for the next decade. Powerful images of waves, waterfalls and walls of water confront the viewer in a torrent of febrile strokes and vigorous brushwork. In her Edge series of works (2016-ongoing) M. Hambling expresses her deep concern for the destruction of the planet; in one haunting and poignant painting from the series, the ghostly outline of a polar bear appears, seemingly lost, perched on a melting ice floe.

After recovering from a heart attack in 2022, on the eve of an opening of a major exhibition in New York, M. Hambling’s resilience expressed itself in a new body of work called Maelstrom. These wildly expressive paintings demonstrate a freedom and abandonment heralding the next phase in an impressive career spanning six decades to date.

Her work can be found in major public collections in the United Kingdom and abroad such as the British Museum, London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She was awarded an OBE in 1995 and a CBE in 2010 for services to art.