CAMBRIDGE, UK.- The Fitzwilliam Museum presents No Straight Lines - Maggi Hambling: Drawings 1963-2007, on view through April 29, 2007. Maggi Hambling, born in Suffolk in 1945, is a distinguished painter and sculptor and one of very few contemporary draughtsmen of real distinction. Drawing - the most direct and intimate of the artist’s strategies - lies at the core of all her work. In charcoal, graphite or ink, a unique life-force is manifest - and there are no straight lines.

In this exhibition of 20 drawings, together with rarely-seen sketchbooks, Hambling achieves a potent language of marks. The drawings - on loan from the Ashmolean Museum, the British Museum and the artist herself - range from the powerful Rhinoceros in Ipswich Museum, 1963, drawn when the artist was seventeen, to the delicate drawing of Sir Georg Solti conducting, 1985, and include memorable images of the artist’s parents, of Amanda Barrie, John Berger, Stephen Fry and Henrietta Moraes. A single bronze sculpture - ironically titled Line, created in 1996 - forms the centrepiece of the exhibition. Her most recent work, on show for the first time, encapsulates the energy of the waves of the North Sea. A catalogue, supported by Marlborough Fine Art, accompanies the exhibition.