1
0 When I see the car number plate ending in “GAY,” I know I’m in the right place. Pulling up to a pretty cottage in rural Suffolk, the statement two-tone Chrysler on the gravel driveway is a tell-tale sign that the owner is artist Maggi Hambling.
She duly emerges from her “junky garage”-turned-studio in instantly recognizable style — her nest of grey hair characteristically bouffant, her eyelashes clumpily coated in mascara, wearing a padded black gilet on top of an oversized white shirt. It’s a look that’s become synonymous with her reputation of being “the original bad girl of British art,” a “queer icon” and a “controversial figure.”
At age 77, Hambling is billed as “one of the greatest painters living today” in the catalog for her current show at Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury, Suffolk, a rural area in the east of England. She’s known for her bold portraits — 13 of which are in the British National Portrait Gallery in London. They range from scientist Dorothy Hodgkin in 1985 to tennis player Andy Murray in 2019 — as well as a much-talked-about trio of public sculptures. Her London monuments to writers Oscar Wilde and Mary Wollstonecraft, as well “Scallop” on Suffolk’s Aldeburgh Beach, have all sparked lively debate over the years.
As has Hambling’s public persona: a fiercely feisty and outspoken grande dame most often accessorized with a permanent scowl, a can of strong beer —which she has previously referred to as “a friend and a food” — and a cigarette.
Today, however, Hambling amiably, if slightly begrudgingly, makes coffee in her skylit painting space. A giant succulent plant stretches up to the ceiling. It’s completely quiet apart from a metronome-like ticking. “I think it’s the Queen,” says Hambling pointing to a trio of wobbly-headed ornaments in one corner. “That bloody Queen makes a hell of a racket.” She started work at 6 a.m. — her regular routine. And while a four-pack of malty, 7.4 per cent-strength lager is propped performatively upon a pile of books on her desk, and she confesses to having drunk copious amounts of Champagne at a 60th birthday party a couple of days ago, her famous cigarettes have been replaced.
“I was a really professional smoker,” she says of the habit she first took up aged 14. “But I had this heart attack,” she adds bluntly of the near-fatal incident that occurred just as she was about to open a show in New York last March. “It was just as well it happened in New York because the ambulance came straight away. I’d be dead if it had happened around here,” she deadpans. “I did stop breathing. I sort of died and came back again.”
After her own near-death experience in 2022, Hambling spent six weeks in hospital, then returned to Suffolk and straightaway began to paint. “It was desperate: I wasn’t smoking; I was still feeling very odd,” she recalls, showing me the dense and stormy compositions she produced during this time in chronological order. Collectively titled “Maelstrom,” the swarming masses of energetic marks are not obviously figurative, yet neither does Hambling think of them as abstract. “They’re about Ukraine, but also about what happened to me,” she says. “I think there’s a freedom about them that possibly wasn’t there before. And the feeling that there’s less time makes them even more urgent.”
These works will be shown for the first time in October by Frankie Rossi Art Projects in London, who will also present Hambling’s work at Frieze Masters (October 11-15). Both will coincide with her first museum exhibition in Italy, at Museo Ettore Fico in Turin. Surprisingly, she admits to being nervous about such openings. “People say, ‘Oh, why are you nervous you’ve had lots of exhibitions,’ but the point is that it’s got to be as good as the last one, if not better,” she muses. “I still live in doubt the whole time about my work.”
