Stand A7
For the 2022 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, Marlborough is pleased to present an exhibition focusing on three artists from successive generations whose lives and practices have intersected. Works by Maggi Hambling, Francis Bacon, and Frank Auerbach will be brought together in order to underline the affinities—and the divergences—between them. Portraits by Hambling, which have never been seen before in the United States, will form the core of the project.
At an early stage, Hambling absorbed Bacon's concern with the real. She regularly encountered his paintings in the 1960s as a student at Camberwell College of Art and was struck both by their lurking eroticism and their application of paint in vigorous swathes. One of her first meetings with Bacon was at Benton End—the avant-garde art school in rural Suffolk that she attended as a teenager. Just a few years earlier, in 1958, Marlborough Fine Art in London had offered Francis Bacon a 10-year contract for exclusive representation, setting a pattern for relationships that the gallery would seek to develop with some of the leading British artists of his generation, including Frank Auerbach. Auerbach and Hambling would each remain close friends of Bacon until his death in 1992.
Setting the work of Hambling, Auerbach and Bacon in dialogue, the display demonstrates how each artist has pursued the idea of portraiture and landscape as metamorphic forces. In the examples on view, each artist employs the figure to articulate unique, expansive styles that teeter, often, on the brink of abstraction. Taken together, we see that each artist is present in the work of the other—and not simply in the traditional sense of "influence." Offering a succession of snapshots of figurative art across the 20th and 21st Centuries, the display will also present a sequence of "lenses" through which each artist may be viewed anew: visitors will be invited to consider how Hambling, Bacon and Auerbach inspire new readings of one another.

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Maggi Hambling

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Francis Bacon

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Frank Auerbach

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