Maggi Hambling, National Gallery - exhibition review
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Maggi Hambling has been painting and drawing the coast near her home in Southwold, Suffolk, for more than a decade, often getting up before dawn to admire the North Sea when she’s alone with it.
The nine large paintings now at the National Gallery were triggered by watching the waves crash against the town’s sea wall in a particularly vigorous storm in 2010. They’re an attempt to grapple with that vast power but also to explore waves as a symbol of the cycle of life and death. Hambling has said she finds the sea sexy; waves are orgasmic as much as they’re overwhelming.
Her struggle to evoke that sensual yet dark energy fills these canvases. All of them are a flurry of thick marks trowelled or smudged on alongside drips and stains, stretching from the base to the top of the canvas, trying to conjure up the force of the waves, the spume and spray. A blackness dominates them, despite bursts of colour which have grown freer as the paintings have evolved.
That darkness is at its most extreme in a one-off, smaller painting called Walls of Water, Amy Winehouse, made after the singer’s death in 2011 — a memorial as well as an attempt to summon the spirit of Winehouse’s music, Hambling says.
There’s certainly vigour in these paintings but it feels forced — as if Hambling is trying too hard to embody the epic nature of her subject in paint.
Oddly, her small black-and-white monotype prints in the National’s basement espresso bar do so far more successfully.
In these, freed from having to make grand statements, she captures the sea’s energy and mystery with great power.
Until February 15 (020 7747 2885, nationalgallery.org.uk)
