The natural order of things may have played some tiny role in bringing together Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas, but chiefly, you feel, the gods used dynamite to achieve the union. This unlikely double act is, as they say, a doozy.
The two could hardly be more different. Lucas, born in London in 1962, was and is a YBA. Age may have sanctified one or two of her atoms, but, essentially, she remains a scion of Holloway Road in north London: mouthy, ungovernable, instinctively squalid. Whereas some YBAs have added damehoods and respectability to their CV, Lucas is still the girl in the pub who belches in a bloke’s face.
Margaret J Hambling CBE is of different stock. Born in Sudbury in Suffolk, Gainsborough country, in 1945, so a couple of decades before Lucas, she had a banker for a father and passed through assorted art schools before careering into full public view in the 1980s as a louche member of the George Melly/Francis Bacon/Henrietta Moraes set, centred on the notorious Colony Room in Soho. Distinctively and loudly “lesbionic” — her word — she dresses like a Victorian dandy in velvets and frilly whites, and often appears on the telly as the universal embodiment of how artists should look.
Maggi Hambling’s Sarah Laughing 2025
© MAGGI HAMBLING AND SARAH LUCAS. COURTESY THE ARTISTS, SADIE COLES HQ AND FRANKIE ROSSI ART PROJECTS. PHOTO: KATIE MORRISON
The small role played by the natural order of things in bringing Lucas and Hambling together at the Sadie Coles HQ in London was played by geography. They both live in Suffolk, where they have formed a profound friendship. Hence this shared show, Ooo La La, spread across two nearby venues, in which they try, largely unsuccessfully, to achieve a creative harmony.
The problem here is that Lucas is something of a genius. Out of notably scruffy materials — stuffed women’s tights, unwanted cigarettes, upended lavatory bowls — she has created a body of work that is outrageously inventive, recurringly prickly, powerfully feminine, but succeeds also in sticking a compass into the eye of any voyeuristic male gazing on it.
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Hambling, alas, has none of that originality or prickly power. Chiefly a painter, she works in a flaying, abstract expressionist manner that is quaintly old-fashioned and involves slapping down furious brushstrokes, with a minimum of obvious control, in the hope that the resulting image will evoke something tangible. It’s cross-your-fingers art. And rarely works.
Self-Portrait presumably started out as some kind of description of her face. But you can stare at it for ever and never discern an actual link. Blue Wind is more obviously an approximation of an angry sea, but there’s something deeply unimpressive about the ambition to evoke the fury of the waves with messy piles of wavy brushstrokes. With Hambling you feel recurringly that the artist’s fabulous image is doing most of the heavy lifting, not the paintwork.
Maggi Hambling, self portrait, diptych, 2024
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND FRANKIE ROSSI ART PROJECTS
Fortunately, she has in Lucas a true friend who manages to raise this event to a special level single-handedly. The show is dominated by her “bunnies”, floppy female mannequins fashioned originally from stuffed tights and party balloons, but given a new respectability here by being cast in bronze and gorgeously lacquered.
They have no heads. It’s all legs, boobs and pointy nipples. Sometimes they wear kinky footwear. Usually, they present themselves from behind, draped Christine Keeler-style over a teasing chair, their skinny bottoms waving twitchily in the air.
Their superpower is their ambiguity. Yes, their “bunny” status marks them out as male playthings with ambitions to accuse — a reading backed up by Lucas’s earlier art, in which ogling blokes were always a target. But the move into bronze and shiny lacquer has revealed a wider set of ambitions, less judgmental, more participatory; if not a pure delight in the pleasures of sex, then at least an admission of mutual temptation.
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She Came in Through the Bathroom Window borrows its title from the Beatles, but its mood from the seaside postcard, with “Came” and “the Bathroom Window” transformed into naughtiness by the provocative rear view being waved at us. In a change of atmosphere, another floppy bunny has collapsed on her chair in a heap of disjointed limbs. She’s called Mira Calix. I had to look it up. Mira Calix was a performer and musician who killed herself in 2022.
Both artists have created portraits of each other as part of the show’s shared dynamic. Sarah Laughing is discernibly a giant mouth opened to Jaws dimensions in an unusually legible attempt by Hambling to capture the hearty howls of her Suffolk pal. It’s a passable attempt to leap the divide between abstraction and figuration.
But it cannot hold a candle to Lucas’s presentations of the chaotic, fag-puffing Hambling. In a sculpture called Maggi, a lavatory bowl and two bare lightbulbs, held together with coat hangers, manage to achieve an inch-perfect spiritual likeness. In Maggi the Maggi, Hambling’s thoughtful face as she stares into space has been created cleverly out of lines of interlocking cigarettes.
Maggi the Maggi, 2025 by Sarah Lucas
© SARAH LUCAS. COURTESY SADIE COLES HQS. PHOTO: KATIE MORRISON
Like a buzz 2025 and Cigarette Teeth 2025 by Lucas. Installation view, OOO LA LA, Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas
© MAGGI HAMBLING AND SARAH LUCAS. COURTESY THE ARTISTS, SADIE COLES HQ AND FRANKIE ROSSI ART PROJECTS. PHOTO: KATIE MORRISON
I was, perhaps, wrong to minimise the connections between them. Something they clearly do share is a heightened taste for squalor. In the show’s best moment, a particularly sleazy Lucas bunny is draped over a chair in front of a photograph, horribly enlarged, of a smoker’s mouth, with receding gums, bloody splatters and teeth stained a deep nicotine yellow. Maggi, if that’s you, you really need to see a dentist.
The bunny, meanwhile, sports a sympathetic colour scheme inspired by the rotting teeth: red boobs, white miniskirt, nicotine yellow booties. Now that’s what I call friendship.
Ooo La La is at Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art, London, to Jan 24
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