Fearless Friendship: Hambling & Lucas Unite For Landmark London Show

A serendipitous meeting on a shared birthday in the smoky confines of Soho’s Colony Room Club sparked one of British art’s most enduring and electrifying friendships. Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas—introduced by the late, flamboyant Sebastian Horsley on October 23, 2000—have maintained a profound artistic kinship that will finally receive its proper celebration this winter in a groundbreaking dual exhibition spanning two Bury Street galleries.

This audacious pairing, jointly presented by Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects, promises to illuminate the unseen threads connecting two seemingly disparate artistic voices. Despite their distinct visual languages, both artists orbit around mortality’s edge with defiant exuberance—a shared philosophical terrain that transcends their divergent aesthetic approaches.

Exhibition Notes: Sarah Lucas and Maggi Hambling

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.