Maggi Hambling

(British, born 1945)

Miss Mace, Saturday Night 92.1 x 75 cm. (36 1/2 x 29 1/2 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Sale; Phillips, London, 12 September 1989, lot 54
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Warehouse Gallery, Maggi Hambling, New Oil Paintings, 1977

Literature
Andrew Lambirth, Maggi Hambling: The Works and Conversations, Unicorn Press, London, 2006, p.58 (col.ill)

The painter and sculptor Maggi Hambling lives and works in London and Suffolk. Hambling became the first Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London, and in 1995 won the Jerwood Painting Prize (with Patrick Caulfield).

Her public sculpture includes A Conversation with Oscar Wilde, London, Scallop, a sculpture to celebrate Benjamin Britten (Aldeburgh, Suffolk - which was awarded the Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture) and, most recently, for Mary Wollstonecraft, unveiled last year on Newington Green, London. Museums that have held solo exhibitions of her work more recently include the National Gallery and the British Museum, London, and in 2019 retrospectives were held at both C.A.F.A. Museum, Beijing, and the Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China. The BBC documentary, Maggi Hambling : Making Love with the Paint was first broadcast in October 2020 and is available on BBC iPlayer.

Hambling has established a reputation over the last four decades as one of Britain's most significant and controversial artists, a singular contemporary force whose work continues to move, seduce and challenge.

'Miss Mace, Saturday Night, was a portrait from memory of an evening visit to the home of our local tobacconist. She had come to my studio to pose for a portrait, and at the end of it Bette and I visited her with a lot of barley wine. This was new to her and she gradually disappeared into a world of her own, her arms repeatedly finding three separate positions. This is the first time I painted multiple arms.' (Maggi Hambing quoted in Andrew Lambirth, Maggi Hambling: The Works and Conversations, Unicorn Press, London, 2006, p.58).