Cathy's Art Diary

Wonderful exhibition at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert of new work by Maggi Hambling. I love Hambling’s work so it was a delight to walk past the gallery and find this show. I hadn’t realised that she had a near fatal heart attack in New York in March 2022. She started this set of paintings immediately following her return to her home. I got a sense both of the joy of life following such an experience and her need to paint to understand what had happened.   I felt a a person who processes life via her art. I loved the mix of thick impasto paint and a thinner runny medium. The commentary described them as “an intense landscape of experience” and I certainly felt I reacted to some like a sublime landscape. I also thought one small one was a a self-portrait. Closed 24 November 2023

Intriguing exhibition at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert of recent self-portraits by Frank Auerbach. The show included 9 paintings and 11 drawings which were full of character. The commentary included a wonderful quote from Auerbach that “Now that I’ve got bags under my eyes, things are sagging and so on, there’s more material to work with”. I preferred the drawings which were finer but the paintings were full of life and colour. They showed his distinct style of building up layers of paint in slabs but were less thick that some of his early work which is almost sculptural. Closed 14 July 2023 Review Guardian