Some friendships are written in the stars—or at least, on the same birthday. Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas first collided on 23 October 2000, at Soho’s long-gone, Colony Room Club, introduced by the irrepressible Sebastian Horsley—artist, dandy, and occasional muse to both. Nearly a quarter-century later, their raucous, unflinching kinship takes centre stage in a two-gallery exhibition this winter at Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects on Bury Street.
This is not just a show about two prominent British artists—it is about how they have mirrored, provoked, and immortalised each other. Death hums beneath their work like a bassline, as does a relentless, life-affirming vulgarity. They have lived in neighbouring Suffolk villages for decades, close enough for Lucas to immortalise Hambling in her 2012 sculptural mash-up Maggi, while Hambling has painted Lucas with the same unsparing intensity she reserves for waves and skulls. Their portraits have hung side by side before—in The Quick and the Dead (Hastings Contemporary, 2018) and Seeing Each Other (Pallant House, 2025)—but this time, the conversation between them is the main event.
They are each other’s favourite sparring partners, whether on stage for talks or in the studio. With her knack for resurrecting the everyday into something slyly obscene, Lucas once said of her Bunny sculptures: “It is about dragging the old into now, making it feel like it has just been ripped out of today.” Hambling, meanwhile, treats paint like a séance—”A real painting pulls you into the moment it was made, like you are watching it happen.” Both steal from life without apology: lovers, friends, whatever is lying around.
The exhibition arrives as Hambling turns 80, marked by a major Rizzoli monograph, while Lucas gets her reckoning with a survey at Helsinki’s Kiasma. However, here, it is not about retrospect—it is about two women still swinging, refusing to play nice.
Maggi Hambling (b. 1945, Sudbury, UK) is a trailblazing British artist, queer icon, and pioneer. From her formative period at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in the early 1960s, to her rise to fame in the ’80s, and output in recent decades, Hambling has maintained importance to British art and a singular place in the global sphere of contemporary art. Love, death, and remembrance are revealed as her enduring themes, and are reflected in her intimate portraits as much as her epic-scaled evocations of war, the climate emergency, and the natural world. Hambling’s work has been the subject of many solo museum shows, most recently across the UK, US, and China and is held in public collections including at the Tate, British Museum, CAFA, Beijing and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Hambling currently displays work in A World of Water, Sainsbury Centre of Visual Art, Norwich (15 March – 3 August 2025) and Sea State, Wolterton Hall, Norfolk (11 June – 7 December 2025).
Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, London, UK) has over the course of the last three decades become recognised as one of Britain’s most significant contemporary artists. Spanning sculpture, photography and installation, her work has consistently been characterised by irreverent humour and the use of everyday ‘readymade’ objects – furniture, food, tabloid newspapers, tights, toilets, cigarettes – to conjure up corporeal fragments. The body, in its many guises, is Lucas’s prevailing subject. In the 1990s, she placed herself at the heart of her work in a series of photographic self-portraits. These images’ disarming mixture of vulnerability and attitudinising set the double-edged tone of much of the artist’s subsequent work. Her solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma opens on 10 October 2025 and continues until 01 March 2026.
Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas 20 November 2025 – January 2026 Sadie Coles HQ & Frankie Rossi Art Projects 8 & 38 Bury Street London SW1Y Opening Wednesday 19 November, 6-8 pm