Maggi Hambling CBE is a British painter and sculptor. Perhaps her best-known public works are the sculptures A Conversation with Oscar Wilde in London and Scallop, a 4-metre-high steel piece on Aldeburgh beach dedicated to Benjamin Britten. Both works have attracted a great degree of controversy.
Maggi Hambling was born in Sudbury, Suffolk She had two siblings, a sister, Ann, who was 11 years older, and a brother, Roger, nine years older than Hambling. Her brother had wanted a brother but ignored the fact that his younger sibling is female and taught her carpentry and "how to wring a chicken's neck." Hambling was close to her mother who taught ballroom dancing and took Hambling along to be her partner. It was from her father that she inherited the paintly and artistic skills. She was not as close to her father as she was to her mother but when her father retired at the age of 60, Hambling gave him some oil paints and discovered that he had a knack for painting.
Hambling first studied art under Yvonne Drewry at the Amberfield School in Nacton. She then studied at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing from 1960 under Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, then at Ipswich School of Art (1962–64), Camberwell (1964–67), and finally the Slade School of Art, graduating in 1969.
Hambling is a painter as well as a sculptor. She is known for her intricate land and seascapes, including a celebrated series of North Sea paintings created since late 2002. She is also known for her portraits, with several works in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
In 1980 Hambling became the first artist in residence at the National Gallery, after which she produced a series of portraits of the comedian Max Wall. Wall responded to Hambling's request to paint him with a letter saying: "Re: painting little me, I am flattered indeed – what colour?" She has taught at Wimbledon School of Art.
Women feature prominently in her portrait series. For example, Hambling was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint Professor Dorothy Hodgkin in 1985. The portrait features Hodgkin at a desk with four hands, all engaged in different tasks. Her wider body of work is held in many public collections including the British Museum, Tate Collection, National Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Hambling is known for her choice in painting the dead. She states that it is her way of grieving for those who are gone, particularly her way of coping with the death of those she held close like Henrietta Moraes, her mother, father in their coffins. Hambling tells NYTimes George Melly gave her the nickname of "Maggi (coffin) Hambling" and joked that this is the name she would be known by. Her work is spurred through anger--for the destruction of the planet, about politics, for social issues.[citation needed]
In 2013, she exhibited at Snape during the Aldeburgh Festival, and a solo exhibition was held at the Hermitage, St Petersburg.[citation needed]
Hambling is frequently described as a controversial figure.
In 1998 Hambling completed this outdoor sculpture in central London as a memorial to the dramatist Oscar Wilde, the first public monument to him outside his native Ireland. .
Fans of Wilde, notably Derek Jarman, first suggested a memorial in the 1980s. A committee, led by Sir Jeremy Isaacs and including the actors Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen and the poet Seamus Heaney, raised the money and commissioned Hambling. Her design features Wilde's bronze head rising from a green granite sarcophagus which also serves as a bench; Wilde's hand was holding a cigarette. The work is inscribed with a quotation from his play Lady Windermere's Fan: "We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars".
Some critics were visceral in their loathing of the work , but supporters said it was well-loved by the public . The chief art critic of The Independent , wrote that ultimately the sculpture was not about Wilde or the viewing public, but a reflection of Hambling herself.
The cigarette was repeatedly removed by members of the public , "the most frequent act of vandalism/veneration done to a public statue in London", and is now no longer replaced.
Scallop (2003) celebrates the composer Benjamin Britten and stands on the beach at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, near where he lived and not far from Hambling's village. The four metre high steel sculpture is pierced with the words "I hear those voices that will not be drowned" from his opera Peter Grimes. Britten was a homosexual and a conscientious objector during World War II, and his memorial was opposed by some.
Hambling describes Scallop as a conversation with the sea:
Throughout antiquity, scallops and other hinged shells have symbolised the feminine principle. The outside of the shell represents protection, and the inside, the "life-force slumbering within the Earth", an emblem of the vulva. Many paintings of Venus, the Roman goddess of love and fertility, included a scallop shell to identify her, as for example in Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.

More...