New wave challenge

Maggi Hambling: Sea Sculpture, Paintings and Etchings
Marlborough Fine Art, 6 Albemarle Street, W1, until 5 June 

Stephen Chambers: The Four Corners
Kings Place Gallery, 90 York Way, N1, until 11 June

Ceri Richards: Retrospective
Jonathan Clark & Co., 18 Park Walk, SW10, until 5 June

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Julie Burchill

Will I ever pee again?

For the past eight years, the sea has been Maggi Hambling’s principal subject. She draws it regularly, makes portraits of it and now has turned to capturing it in bronze. As Norbert Lynton observed (in another context): ‘The idea of the sea as matter for sculpture should give us pause: not even [Medardo] Rosso, master sculptor of the momentary and the contextual, attempted anything like that.’ Hambling (born 1945) likes a challenge, and, in taking on the wave in solid three-dimensional form, she has certainly set herself that.

The show at the Marlborough consists of a dozen free-standing sculptures of waves curling, rearing, rolling, tossing seaweed and laughing at the moon. The range is aggressive to playful, and the crusted bronze surfaces are pierced with lunar silhouettes or the broken teeth of breakwaters, bedecked with bobbly necklaces of bladderwrack, horripilant with spume and spray. In addition, there are another couple of dozen bronze wall reliefs. Each bronze is a unique cast, and Hambling has been inventive with the polishing and patination to provide a pleasing variety of colour and surface texture. To my mind, the reliefs are the most successful of the sculptures, less confrontational and pugilistic, more relaxed and quietly beguiling in their physical presence.

This is partly to do with the increased abstraction of their language. Freed from the requirement to describe or evoke a wave in three-dimensional form, Hambling can concentrate her considerable energies and invention upon making an image that works as an object of what might be called ‘enhanced linearity’ rather than mass.