Covid: Maggi Hambling unveils 75th birthday lockdown works

Painter Maggi Hambling has unveiled a collection of works created during lockdown to mark her 75th birthday.

The artist, from Suffolk, whose works include her Scallop sculpture in Aldeburgh, celebrates the milestone on 23 October.

Her new exhibition at Marlborough Gallery in London, titled 2020, features a series of self-portraits painted during the pandemic.

It also features pictures of at-risk animals.

The lockdown in spring gave rise to Self-Portrait (Angry) an abstract image painted with oil on canvas.

In Self-Portrait, Working, Hambling is seen as if from the point of view of the canvas, as a faint grey silhouette.

Elephant Without Tusk, Lion In Enclosure and Young Dancing Bear show animals in danger, echoing her previous work highlighting humanity's effect on the natural world.

Her Edge series of 2017 depicted dissolving polar icecaps.

Hambling, who has worked across painting, sculpture, printmaking and installation, became a CBE in 2009.

Her Scallop sculpture in Aldeburgh, unveiled in 2003, was a tribute to Lowestoft-born composer Benjamin Britten but the four metre (13ft) installation caused controversy when it appeared on Suffolk's heritage coast.

In 2017, the British Museum hosted a retrospective of her work on paper, and a major retrospective exhibition of her work across all media was held in China in 2019.

The exhibition runs from 15 October to 21 November.

This autumn Hambling will also unveil a public sculpture for feminist writer and advocate Mary Wollstonecraft in Newington Green, London.

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