If you walk past The Ritz and take a right down St James, left on Jermyn Street, and right again, you will find yourself in Bury Street, the nexus of London’s art establishment (parallel to Duke and Mason’s Yard). Look through the window of Sadie Coles at number 8, and you will glimpse a flash of red bounce off the liquiform enamel buttocks of a leggy, headless figure, crouched in stilettos on a concrete chair. Behind this, a flourish of crimson paint amidst a swirling storm of frothing bilateral marks draws your eye into a large canvas that seems created by the explosive force of pure desire. There is a strange harmony between these two things, the subtle equivalences of mutual understanding as expressed through different mediums.
Further down at number 38, Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert with Frankie Rossi Art Projects, another nubile creature, similarly unclad but for the glistening spike of platform heels and the crinkled slip of a bodysuit, crawls with its arse up in the air over the back of a concrete chair, weird sausage arms reaching towards something. Instead of a head, ripe nipples from two full breasts are eyeing you. Just out of reach behind this contortion is a diptych; unctuous daubs of red paint seem to capture the final iteration of a frenzied reaction, as if all the juices that have risen in response to this glossy red creature have landed there. The scene is outrageously provocative and deliciously staged.
Both scenarios are part of one exhibition, ‘OOO LA LA’ by Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas; a sensational, life-affirming show that reveals the affinity of driving forces between these artists – above all, their sense of life’s proximity to death, and their defiant, defining exuberance. It is also, quietly, a form of occupation. A collaboration between Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects, who frequently collaborate with Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, sharing their St James’s gallery space, this ambitious, museum-level show spans both galleries on Bury Street – and everybody is talking about it. Bringing two icons together like this, on view to anyone who happens to walk past, gives us access to one of the most important (and enduring) intergenerational conversations in contemporary art today – it is art history in the making.
The show’s origin story has long legs. According to legend, Hambling and Lucas met on their shared birthday (born 17 years apart) at the Colony Room Club in 2000 and have remained close friends since – a rare feat for two artists in a highly competitive, often divisive art market. Despite (or perhaps because of) their radically different styles, techniques and material inclinations, their deep and lasting friendship reflects a shared sensibility: the absurd, performative nature of sex and desire, the surreal proximity of life with death, and the refusal to compromise. Everything you see in this show has been created with brutal honesty and total irreverence, including forms of mutual representation. The audience is both witness to mutual admiration – of both Hambling and Lucas seeing and being seen – and given privileged access to what drives their respective process and chosen mediums.
In the corner of the last room in this show is one such vision: a strange one-eyed being, fashioned out of stockings, wearing beat-up trainers, and holding a fag. Watching you from every angle, this sculpture is nothing like anything else in the show, for how specifically it captures the character of somebody: Hambling. That Lucas can do this, and Hambling is happy to show it, says everything you need to know about their friendship. Each has portrayed the other: Lucas’s sculptural assemblage, Maggi (2012) and Hambling’s oil portraits of Lucas have appeared together in exhibitions such as ‘The Quick and the Dead’, Hastings Contemporary (2018), and ‘Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists’, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2025). Frequently, they request each other’s company for talks. Both possess a riotous capacity for recounting their misadventures in the art world whilst not taking themselves too seriously (“I don’t stand around the whole time with my hand on my chin looking tough and surly”, Lucas joked in an interview with Frieze. “My best work is done when I forget myself,” muses Hambling).
Given the geographical proximity of their studios in rural Suffolk, the evolution of this exhibition was natural in its progression. It also demonstrates a healthy level of trust between the artists and their gallerists, who have enabled the final iterations of this mutual love story to unfold. Further, they do not patronise us with didactic wall texts and academic musings. The pairing of works is magnificent in its simplicity, for how it draws us into the conversations happening around the works, highlighted by the choice of complementary wall tones, without providing an answer. There is a generosity at play here, as if each is determined to gift the other a bit of magic. Perhaps this is because the conversation between Hambling and Lucas is intergenerational, whilst one might eclipse the other, neither has to compete for the same spot in art history.
Cleverly, the title of the show serves to emphasise this, for it could refer to a song currently on the radio, “Oh la, la, la, it’s the way that you feel when you know it’s real”, but it could also be said with a faux French accent in consternation, or any number of other things. It is worth noting that Frankie Rossi Art Projects, founded in 2023 by Frankie Rossi in partnership with John Erle Drax and Geoffrey Parton, is the sole worldwide representative of Frank Auerbach and has a longstanding history of working with some of the most influential painters and sculptors of the 20th century, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Barbara Hepworth. Clearly, they share Lucas’ enthusiasm for Hambling, who is arguably undervalued compared to her peers.
How a well-known art critic failed to see this, in his scathing one-sided review of the show, that blessed Lucases’ “male-fantasy” sculptures and slayed Hambling’s “slapdash mess” paintings, actually brings us to the very brilliant essence of this show, staged at the epicentre of London’s art dealer establishment. It gives us a real time example of why artists like Hambling are not given the same critical appraisal as their male counterparts; not only for the historic fact that male sleuths are afforded more privileges than women, but because they fail to try and understand the complex, often messy position of a woman as artist, whilst being impervious to the subtle, intimate nuances of female friendship. Too often, critics write about sex and death, but rarely do we find any honest commentary on the true and lasting nature of love. But if said critic missed all the joy, pathos and exuberance I found in the falling apart looseness of everything in “OOO LALA”, or how the consistent refusal to be prim and proper leads to epic, inimitable form creation, then it’s his loss. This show already has its own legacy.
Moreover, what feels especially relevant – Avant-garde even – is the amount of space both artists were given to develop works for this show. All that luxurious time Lucas and Hambling had together, making art for an exhibition in this central London location, is something to be celebrated. The exhibition succeeds in acknowledging both the contrasts and the deeper continuities between their respective bodies of work. Speaking about her iconic series of Bunny sculptures, Lucas has observed: “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.” For Hambling, too, a painting exists in a kind of eternal present tense: “The one crucial thing that only painting can do is to make you feel as if you’re there while it’s being created – as if it’s happening in front of you.”
Shown together, we understand that both in making and in looking at art, there is no appropriate response – you just have to let yourself go. Simple, but completely liberating. Go – run – to this show and bring your bestie with you.
OOO LA LA: Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas, 20 November 2025 – 24 January 2026
8 and 38 Bury Street SW1Y
Presented by Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art
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Nico Kos Earle, December 2025, photos ©Artlyst 2025
The exhibition will also launch the major new monograph of Hambling’s work, published by Rizzoli New York to coincide with the artist’s 80th birthday. Sarah Lucas is the subject of a survey exhibition at Kiasma in Helsinki.