Maggi Hambling: ORIGINS

About

ORIGINS, a new exhibition at the recently transformed Gainsborough's House, spans six decades of Hambling's work, bearing witness to the artist's deep connection with Suffolk and inviting a meditation on the universal relationships between self and environment, people and place.

Exhibited in the new galleries designed by ZMMA architects and comprised of around 30 works, the paintings and drawings in ORIGINS express a combination of exterior reality and interior life. Portrayals of people and places carry a sense of longer time: the unfolding of life, the workings of memory, the evolution of love, and the inescapable proximity of life to death – a theme that recurs throughout Hambling's art. Suffolk links the artist's early and present lives – she was born in Sudbury in 1945, she grew up in Hadleigh and has lived in rural Suffolk since the late 1990s.