Maggi Hambling Origins Exhibition Catalogue

“Maggi Hambling’s origins lie in Sudbury, where, like Thomas Gainsborough, she was born. Her first experience of great painting was at Gainsborough’s House and it feels like a very special moment in our history that we are able to show Hambling’s work in the transformed galleries alongside the works that first inspired her to take up the brush.

Maggi Hambling is one of the greatest painters living
today. In an age when the image often eclipses the painting itself, it is a privilege to see a painter create work that embraces the physicality, surface and movement of paint. In this she appears supremely natural, and there is an instinctive brilliance and rare mastery in her use of the medium. Fluidity, movement and powerful gesture magically evoke emotion and memory in
their reflection of the physical world through the prism of her experience and inspiration.

In the works selected for the exhibition, we can see both darkness and light, the personal and the universal. The works embrace the paradox of life and the duality of body and spirit, where the physical body of paint holds the spirit, its thought, idea, and memory. I am extremely grateful to Maggi for showing such a deep and personal exhibition at Gainsborough’s House” – Mark Bills, Director of Gainsborough’s House