Maelstrom
"in life we're just shadows, but we're a long time dead." - Maggi Hambling
Frankie Rossi Art Projects presents Maelstrom, 5 October - 24 November 2023, an exhbition comprising a new series of paintings by Maggi Hambling, the first made on her return to the studio following a near-fatal heart attack in New York in March 2022, two days prior to an exhbition of her work opening there.
During her six weeks in a Manhattan hospital, the artist's six-decade practice of returning daily to her work came to a halt. On the second day of her return to the UK, the Maelstrom series began. The resulting paintings are testaments to the tentative, determined resumption of her daily practice - and to the trauma of recovery. Having been closer to death than ever before, Hambling returned to her art with renewed urgency and force. The paintings manifest intense landscapes of experience - each is a portrait of where the heart and mind go when the body is compromised - a realm at once mysterious and challenging, sublime and intimate. Hambling's Maelstrom paintings affirm, ultimately, what it means to be alive.
