About this lot

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§ Maggi Hambling CBE (1945-) Wild Summer Sea IIsigned, titled and dated 07-08 to the reverseoil on canvas30 x 25.5cmProvenance:With Lynne Strover Gallery, Cambridge, where acquired in July 2008Often beginning her days by watching, hearing and feeling the voracious waves of North Sea from the shores of the Suffolk coast, Maggi Hambling has described the sea as ‘the widest of mouths, roaring or laughing’. Life and death, she says, ‘mysteriously co-exist in the timeless rhythm of the waves.’ Much like the Suffolk coastline, Hambling’s work and life have become shaped by the sea, indelibly carved by the inevitability of the tides.Unknowable, inexorable, and inconceivably vast, Hambling is certainly not the first artist to have been drawn towards the sea – indeed her North Sea series, initially conceived in 2002, can be contextualised within the traditions of the Romantic and the Sublime in art. Frequently compared to the works of Friedrich, Constable, and Turner, Hambling’s wave paintings possess an immediacy and potency that both describes the thrashing power of the sea and communicates Edmund Burke’s conceptualisation of the Sublime being bound to the awe and terror elicited by the natural world.Unlike the work of her predecessors, however, Hambling’s paintings, as exhibited by the present lots, place the viewer with the wave, amidst the swirling welter and crushing surf. Hambling succeeds in evoking the tumult of the sea not only through the positioning of the viewer, but also through the performative nature of her painting. Utilising thick impasto, energetic, lashing strokes and an explosive use of colour, Hambling’s paintings are close to sculptural and deftly mimic the screaming ferocity of the ocean.Overall good condition

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