Maggi Hambling: Nightingale Night opens at Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery

Maggi Hambling: Nightingale Night offers a new series of paintings by one of Britain’s most celebrated artists. Marked by a distinctive palette of gold on black, Hambling’s latest works will respond simultaneously to the Sussex landscape, the call of the nightingale and the transformative impact of sound.

Melanie Vandenbrouck, chief curator at Pallant House, said: “Over a six-decade career, Maggi Hambling (b1945) has remained provocative and prolific, renowned equally for her public sculpture, her numerous portraits, and paintings in which diverse themes whether those of nature or war, the climate emergency or self-reckoning converge.

“At the core of this exhibition will be a series of new paintings inspired by a night spent in the Sussex woodland in 2023. Hambling was taken on an expedition by the folk musician and conservationist Sam Lee, at a time of year when nightingales are returning from the west coast of Africa.

“Through the darkness and rain, the birds’ mating calls came to Hambling as an unexpected epiphany. Her paintings will bear witness to the power and beauty of that moment. In contrast to her 2023 series Maelstrom, which responded to global and personal traumas notably the war in Ukraine and her heart attack the previous year, Hambling’s new paintings will be affirmations of life. Her expressionist handling of paint evokes an extraordinary vitality and energy.

“In this exhibition, Hambling will explore the idea of birdsong transposed into gesture and colour. Her personal response to the sound of the birds will be reflected in two self-portraits, Listening to Nightingales I & II, in which the gold paintwork forms silhouettes.

“Human song is another recurring theme of the exhibition. Paintings inspired by the songs and voices of Leonard Cohen, PJ Harvey and Will Young will mirror the colour and pulsing energy of the Nightingale Night series. The display will also feature a monumental piece inspired by Nick Cave’s Night of the Lotus Eaters.

“Radiant, rhythmic and lyrical, Hambling’s new paintings will harbour an underlying poignancy, both in terms of the transience of birdsong and the endangerment of the nightingale due to climate change. In this respect, they will transmit a mood – found everywhere in her art – of life in delicate balance with death.”

Maggi Hambling said: “The sound of song became my subject – an attempt to hold a fleeting moment in the night air: as with Courbet (the French avant-garde painter who headed the Realist movement), who painted so that people might hear the sound of a deer as it came through the forest.”

Simon Martin, director of Pallant House Gallery, added: “We are thrilled to be presenting Maggi Hambling's new body of work for the first time at Pallant House Gallery, not only in the context of our collection of Modern British art, which includes many of her friends and contemporaries, but also, appropriately, in Sussex where Maggi was first inspired by hearing the sound of nightingale song.”

Maggi Hambling: Nightingale Night will run from November 9 to April 27 in Pallant House Gallery’s historic house and will be accompanied by a dedicated publication written by art historian and critic James Cahill and folksinger Sam Lee.