Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas have been friends for nearly twenty-five years — not the art world’s polite, arm’s-length sort of friends, but the real kind. The kind who drink together, argue, laugh too loudly, and end up immortalising each other in paint and bronze. They first met on 23 October 2000 — their shared birthday, of course — at Soho’s infamous Colony Room Club. Introduced by their mutual partner-in-crime, the late Sebastian Horsley, they clicked instantly. Two sharp tongues, both allergic to pretension, both drawn to the darker edges of humour and mortality.
This winter, that long friendship takes form as a joint exhibition across Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects on Bury Street. This is not a retrospective, but something more electric — a conversation between two artists who’ve spent decades circling the same questions: how to make sense of life’s brevity, how to find joy in the wreckage, how to keep laughing at the void.
Hambling and Lucas have lived for years within spitting distance of each other in rural Suffolk, though “rural” feels almost irrelevant. Their worlds are intensely human, not pastoral. Each has portrayed the other: Lucas’s sculptural assemblage Maggi (2012) and Hambling’s fierce, loving portraits of Lucas have shown side by side before — in The Quick and the Dead at Hastings Contemporary (2018), and more recently at Pallant House Gallery’s Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists (2025). You get the sense they’re not just painting or sculpting one another, but keeping score, swapping roles — muse, mirror, accomplice.
What makes this pairing work isn’t sameness but tension. Lucas’s work — her famous Bunnies, her crude humour sharpened to near elegance — pulls from the everyday detritus of the world. Tights, furniture, cigarettes, things that once touched skin. She once said, “On the one hand, it’s about looking at the old things, and on the other, it’s wanting to bring them right back to a state of freshness that has to have something to do with right now.” Hambling, meanwhile, wrestles with time differently. Her paintings — whether waves, lovers, or ghosts — trap a fleeting moment and make it eternal. “The one crucial thing that only painting can do,” she’s said, “is to make you feel as if you’re there while it’s being created – as if it’s happening in front of you.”
Both artists work from what’s around them — friends, lovers, scraps of matter, the emotional leftovers of living. There’s something almost pagan in their approach, a belief that everything close at hand has spirit, mischief, resistance.
This show also doubles as a celebration. Hambling turns eighty this year, marked by a new monograph from Rizzoli New York — a hefty, overdue tribute to her wild, uncontainable career. Lucas, meanwhile, has her own milestone: a major survey at Kiasma in Helsinki. Two artists, two paths, still crossing — both proof that friendship, like art, can be loud, loyal, and gloriously unrefined.
Maggi Hambling
Maggi Hambling doesn’t paint to please. She paints to provoke, to wake things up — people, paint, the sea. Born in Suffolk in 1945, she studied at Ipswich, Camberwell, and the Slade, where her fierce independence was already showing. Her portraits, whether of lovers, poets, or the dead, are never still. They breathe. They sneer back. Hambling came to wider notice in the 1980s with her raw, humane portrait of George Melly, and later, with her unflinching depictions of death and desire.
She’s as much a sculptor as a painter, though the two bleed together. Scallop (2003), her four-metre tribute to Benjamin Britten on Aldeburgh beach, remains both beloved and loathed — the perfect Hambling mix. There’s no tidy consensus around her work, and she wouldn’t want one.
In recent years, she’s turned repeatedly to the sea — furious, abstract canvases that feel more like confrontations than landscapes. The paint thrashes, the waves rise, and the viewer is left clinging to something invisible. Hambling lives and works between Suffolk and London, still smoking, still laughing, still irreverent. Few British artists of her generation have stayed so defiantly themselves. She paints like someone who knows time is short, and everything worth saying is messy.
Sarah Lucas
Sarah Lucas emerged from the 1990s as one of the leading YBAs (Young British Artists). Born in London in 1962, she studied at Goldsmiths, that messy, media-savvy crew who turned British art on its head. While others chased glamour, Lucas dealt in something grittier: sex, humour, the body in all its awkward, collapsing glory. Her materials — old mattresses, fried eggs, cigarettes, tights stuffed with fluff — were the debris of everyday life, twisted into symbols of desire and defiance.
Her early self-portraits, often with a cigarette hanging loose and a stare that could cut through concrete, became something of a personal brand — the artist as anti-muse. She made sculpture punk again, in a way. Au Naturel (1994), that infamous arrangement of fruit and furniture, said more about gender and class than a dozen manifestos.
Over time, the work has grown leaner but no softer. She represented Britain at the 2015 Venice Biennale with a show that was equal parts bawdy and elegiac. Lucas still lives and works in London and Suffolk, still pushing against good taste, still proving that art, like humour, works best when it’s uncomfortable.
Photo: Image: © Julian Simmons © 2025 Courtesy Sadie Coles
OOO LA LA, Sarah Lucas and Maggi Hambling, presented by Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art, 8 and 38 Bury Street SW1Y, 20 November 2025 – 24 January 2026