IT IS no surprise that, having laid the foundation stone for Hastings Contemporary in 2010, Maggi Hambling is included in the gallery’s tenth-anniversary exhibition “Making Waves”. What was unexpected was seeing the artist’s Cormorant Rising emerge from its tape and bubble wrapping, as the director, Liz Gilmore, unpacked the painting ready for hanging. The additional unveiling added a layer of kinetic energy to the expressive inky-black bird on a cream background, as it emerged from the waves, suspended between sea and sky. There is a vibrancy to the piece, the rapid outline and limited palette capturing the bird’s grace and purposeful use of effort.
Hastings Contemporary is by the beach, and Hambling has been known for sea paintings since 2002, when she started a series that continues to this day. She associates the sea with life: “The approach of a distant wave gathering momentum is exciting. Then it becomes solid, reaches its climax, dissolves and retreats, and the whole sensual drama begins again. Moving water is a potent symbol of life. When a wave breaks, the skin of the surface meets the flesh of the depths.” Hambling is also celebrated for her Good Friday series, where she creates a piece in response to a Gospel reading of the Passion every year.
Ansel Krut’s imposing Last Man Standing (2014) brings to mind Francis Newton Souza’s The Agony of Christ (1958), housed at Britten Pears Art, Aldeburgh, near where Hambling was born. Both works by artists born and educated in Commonwealth countries render agony in a stylised collation of simplified facial features. But, while Souza concentrated on the Christ figure’s defiant, angry face, Krut’s figure in crucifixion pose is more traditionally depicted, with elongated limbs forming strong horizontal and vertical lines across the picture plane.
The face is almost an X-ray, with the brain’s left and right hemispheres visible at the top of the skull, heavily outlined and shaded in grey and pale yellow. The eyes are simply sockets, the nose a sketchily outlined pointed mass, the mouth a gash, and the chin an exaggerated cleft, coloured penicillin pink to contrast with the pallor of the face above. Krut’s subject is fastened to his site of agony not by nails, but by four disembodied yellow arms, naïvely depicted with flattened perspective, and topped by angular, elongated paw-like hands.
Quaker-educated Rachel Howard’s Saint Veronica (2021) is a small, square contemporary representation, in oil and acrylic on canvas, of the veil believed, according to tradition dating from the Middle Ages, to have wiped Christ’s face on the way to Calvary. Rome is traditionally held to be the site of relics of the veil bearing Christ’s face, an image produced by processes outwith the human sphere, known as acheiropoieton, made without hand. Copies associated with the relic are housed in churches in Vienna, Jaén, and Alicante. Howard was Damian Hirst’s assistant in the early 1990s, and he describes her as “the best spot painter”. The delicacy and precision is evident in the grey-toned evocation of the saintly veil, with its scalloped edge outlined in black, and dark foliage pattern traced across the surface.
Ms Gilmore says that nurturing and supporting artists as they build careers is part of Hastings Contemporary’s DNA, and “Making Waves” is testament to the gratitude that they feel, as all the works are for sale to support the gallery. Chantal Joffe’s Self Portrait with Esme on the Promenade (2014) is an unsentimental oil-on-board portrait of the artist with her daughter Esme, emphasising the generational difference between the two. Their clothing in barely graduated block colours harmonises with the flattened, stylised beach and sky in the background. Joffe’s take on the family portrait includes capturing moments of stiffness and awkwardness, as adolescents assert their own identity.
Stephen Chambers’s The Court of Redonda: Warden of the Turtles (2016-17) is one work from a series of 101 oil-on-panel portraits of imaginary characters, first shown in the 2017 Venice Biennale. Stemming from an invented regime for an uninhabited Caribbean island, Redonda, Chambers envisages a utopian society dominated by those who create things. He said that he wanted his fictional bohemia to contain idlers as well as poets and painters, and the tousle-haired Warden of the Turtles has a lounge-lizard air in his forest-green jacket and loose-collared shirt.
The bark-like broken pattern across the jacket, echoed by the small check of the shirt, lend a reptilian feel to the subject over and above his role with turtles. Chambers’s painting simultaneously creates the world of Redonda, with all its intrigues and pleasures, and also brings to life characters who feel like an illumination of the people we encounter every day.
”Making Waves” showcases the strength of figurative painting in contemporary art, and the continuing appeal of expressing aspects of the Christian story for a 21st-century audience.
At Hastings Contemporary, Rock-a-Nore Road, Hastings, East Sussex, until 12 March 2023. Phone 01424 728377. hastingscontemporary.org