Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas

20 Nov 2025-1 Jan 2026

Overview

At 8 & 38 Bury Street London SW1Y.

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 will 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’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 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: “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 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.