LONDON.- The British artists Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas are friends. Good friends. They first met on 23 October 2000, their shared birthday, at the legendary Colony Room Club in Soho, introduced by mutual friend, artist and Soho dandy Sebastian Horsley (1962-2010), who featured at various times in each of their works. This winter, Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects present a unique exhibition by Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas spanning two galleries on Bury Street. The exhibition reveals the affinities between the artist’s distinct approaches – above all, their sense of life’s proximity to death, and their defiant – defining – exuberance.
Over three decades, living in relative proximity in rural Suffolk, Hambling and Lucas have maintained a close bond. 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). They are each other’s preferred company for talks, and riotous raconteurs of adventures as artists spanning two centuries.
The exhibition asserts the contrasts as well as the deeper continuities between their respective bodies of work. In relation to 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, the past can be reanimated in a work of art, with a painting expressing 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.” Both artists make authentic use of that which surrounds them, including friends and lovers, and ‘things close to hand.’
The exhibition also launches 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.
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 Tate, British Museum, CAFA, Beijing and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Hambling currently has work on display 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 10 October 2025 and continues until 01 March 2026. In autumn 2025 Sarah Lucas’s VENUS VICTORIA opens in the outdoor plaza at the New Museum, New York, an inaugural commission made possible by the William “Beau” Wrigley Jr. Foundation Sculpture Award.
Frankie Rossi Art Projects specialises in British artists from the post-war period. They are the sole worldwide representatives of Frank Auerbach and have a longstanding history of working with some of the most influential painters and sculptors of the 20th century including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth, Maggi Hambling, Henry Moore, Victor Pasmore, Paula Rego, and Euan Uglow. They frequently collaborate with Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, sharing their Bury Street gallery space to present unique exhibitions.
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