{"id":555291,"date":"2025-11-07T14:50:14","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T14:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/555291\/"},"modified":"2025-11-07T14:50:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T14:50:14","slug":"maggi-hambling-and-sarah-lucas-ooo-la-la","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/555291\/","title":{"rendered":"Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas- OOO LA LA"},"content":{"rendered":"

The British artists Maggi Hambling<\/a> and Sarah Lucas<\/a> are friends. Good friends. They first met on 23 October 2000, their shared birthday, at the legendary Colony Room Club in Soho<\/a>, introduced by mutual friend, artist and Soho dandy Sebastian Horsley<\/a> (1962- 2010), who featured at various times in each of their works. This November Sadie Coles HQ<\/a> and\u00a0Frankie Rossi Art Projects<\/a>\u00a0will present a unique exhibition by Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas spanning two galleries on Bury Street. The exhibition will reveal the affinities between the artist\u2019s distinct approaches \u2013 above all, their sense of life\u2019s proximity to death, and their defiant \u2013 defining \u2013 exuberance.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Maggi Hambling, Sarah at work, oil on canvas, 2025, 60\u00d748 inches, courtesy the artist and Frankie Rossi Art Projects<\/p>\n

Over three decades, living in relative proximity in rural Suffolk, Hambling and Lucas have maintained a close bond. Each has portrayed the other: Lucas\u2019s sculptural assemblage,\u00a0Maggi\u00a0(2012) and Hambling\u2019s oil portraits of Lucas have appeared together in exhibitions such as \u2018The Quick and the Dead\u2019, Hastings Contemporary (2018), and \u2018Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists\u2019, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2025). They are each other\u2019s preferred company for talks, and riotous raconteurs of adventures as artists spanning two centuries.<\/p>\n

The exhibition will assert 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:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cOn the one hand, it\u2019s about looking at the old things, and on the other, it\u2019s wanting to bring them right back to a state of freshness that has to have something to do with right now.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For Hambling, too, the past can be reanimated in a work of art, with a painting expressing a kind of eternal present tense:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThe one crucial thing that only painting can do is to make you feel as if you\u2019re there while it\u2019s being created \u2013 as if it\u2019s happening in front of you.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Both artists make authentic use of that which surrounds them, including friends and lovers, and \u2018things close to hand.\u2019<\/p>\n

The exhibition will also launch the major new monograph of Hambling\u2019s work, published by Rizzoli New York to coincide with the artist\u2019s 80th birthday. Sarah Lucas is the subject of a survey exhibition at Kiasma in Helsinki.<\/p>\n

OOO LA LA<\/strong> Maggi Hambling <\/strong>and Sarah Lucas<\/strong> Presented by Sadie Coles HQ & Frankie Rossi Art Projects<\/strong> at 8 & 39 Bury Street<\/a>, St James\u2019s 20th November 2025 \u2013 24th January 2026<\/p>\n

Art<\/strong> Opening <\/strong>Wednesday 19th November, 6PM-8PM<\/p>\n

About the artist<\/p>\n

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 \u201980s, 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\u2019s 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\u00a0A World of Water, Sainsbury Centre of Visual Art, Norwich (15 March \u2013 3 August 2025) and Sea State, Wolterton Hall, Norfolk (11 June \u2013 7 December 2025).<\/p>\n

Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, London, UK) has over the course of the last three decades become recognised as one of Britain\u2019s most significant contemporary artists. Spanning sculpture, photography and installation, her work has consistently been characterised by irreverent humour and the use of everyday \u2018readymade\u2019 objects \u2013 furniture, food, tabloid newspapers, tights, toilets, cigarettes \u2013 to conjure up corporeal fragments. The body, in its many guises, is Lucas\u2019s prevailing subject. In the 1990s she placed herself at the heart of her work in a series of photographic self-portraits. These images\u2019 disarming mixture of vulnerability and attitudinising set the double-edged tone of much of the artist\u2019s subsequent work. Her solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma opens 10 October 2025 and continues until 01 March 2026.<\/p>\n

CategoriesTagsAuthor \"\"<\/p>\n

Mark Westall<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Mark Westall is the Founder and Editor of FAD magazine –<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The British artists Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas are friends. Good friends. They first met on 23 October…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":555292,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,393,177484,4884,257,113109,94327,177485,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-555291","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-frankie-rossi-art-projects","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-london","13":"tag-maggi-hambling","14":"tag-sadie-coles-hq","15":"tag-sarah-lucas","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115508978528480538","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=555291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555291\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/555292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=555291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=555291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=555291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}