War: what is it good for? Well, art, actually. Some of Maggi Hambling’s greatest works have used violent conflict as their inspiration, and now the grumpy doyenne of British modern art has filled room after room of King’s College in the Strand with paintings and sculptures about that most gruesome and senseless of human endeavours.
It’s not a pleasant exhibition, obviously. It’s vicious, angry, sad and gory. The various works on canvas in particular are powerful pieces of meditation on death and pain, some abstract, some figurative. Skulls cradle each other, faces peer morbidly out of some impossibly dark gloom, features melt into nothingness and, in ‘Gulf Women Prepare for War’, fighters in headscarves crouch in a pink desert, firing bazookas at unseen targets. Hambling’s is such a physical way of painting. She scratches into the canvas, tears and scrapes at the paint like she’s dragging her nails across each work.
The best works here though are placed in an installation that does them no favours. ‘War Requiem II’ features a collection of dark little canvases filled with contorted faces that scream silently. These are the bloodied mutilated visages of war, flesh blown off by bombs, features hidden by gore and frozen in pain. They’re fantastic paintings, like mini, gory Francis Bacons. But they’re locked in a room where Hambling has set Benjamin Britten’s ‘War Requiem’ playing at ear-splitting volumes. It’s a great piece of music, but it distracts so fully from the paintings that you wish it wasn’t there. The paintings are powerful enough, they don’t need an opera singer screaming about war to make them better.
There are also an awful lot of sculptures on show, all made of found bits of driftwood, recast in bronze and hand-painted. This ‘Aftermath’ series looks like a collection of gargoyles, but also alludes to the deformed features of the war-wounded. Gruesome stuff, but still not as great as the paintings.
You just want to see everything stripped back here – no audio installations or fancy layouts. Hambling’s work is often brilliant, you just wish she’d let it speak for itself sometimes.
Eddy Frankel