There is more sea but this may be melting ice-caps, a boat adrift on wilderness of water and there are portraits, of Beethoven, Hamlet, Leonard Cohen and herself, some more recognizable than others. And there is war-torn Aleppo with figurative traces of architecture in the proces of being degraded.
If much that might be identifiable, it is often obliterated by brushwork that leaves her self-portait Hangover as a disfigured character and Hamlet as inconclusive but possibly incendiary at the same time.
A clue in Ghost, which is another self-portrait, might tempt us to think it is not the only painting that has 'gone beyond' the reach of our accustomed consciousness to something only to be understood as visceral power but Aleppo IV and a couple of the Edge paintings lack the flecks of colour that appear in most of them -oranges, yellows, reds- to present bleak canvasses in which the paint left to run down them are more than subliminally tear-stained and ruined.
They are haunted by thoughts of apocalypse, that perhaps it is too late and the world is beyond redemption which hasn't always been the implication of Maggi's work in which power, the energy of life and nature and celebration of such elements have been more in evidence. In the catalogue, Hangover, with its Marlboro set into the oil, is opposite Lungs with obvious implications.
Never less than powerful and uncompromising in her painting, and one can make out a gnarled head in the grotesque sculpture called Politician, this latest exhibition is as unrelenting as ever and however grim the prognosis appears to be, it is nonetheless compelling and admirable for that.
Edge V here is lifted from the Marlborough Fine Arts website. I hope they don't mind. They are a class act, providing me with a lovely ethically-sound canvas bag to put the catalogue in, and not even charging 5p like Tesco does for a plastic carrier bag and the catalogue, for a tenner, is wonderful. It was a tremendous bonus to be able to fit this into an itinerary based on a trip to the Wigmore Hall, as above.
