MAGGI HAMBLING, SARAH LUCAS

Hambling and Lucas first met 25 years ago, on 23 October 2000, their shared birthday, at the Colony Room Club in Soho. Since then, they have built a friendship marked by admiration and trust. They laugh a lot together. They are also neighbours in rural Suffolk, which keeps their bond grounded in the everyday, and sustained through conversation. That long proximity sits at the heart of the exhibition, showing how two distinct practices can speak to each other.

OOO LA LA explores the affinities between their approaches, above all their alertness to how sex and death coexist. These themes belong to the same lived register, met with frankness and nerve. The exhibition is not the result of a joint studio process. The works were developed in parallel, and the connection becomes vivid when they are brought together. In their words, “The extraordinary thing is that when you’re in the show, it’s as if we were working at opposite ends of the same studio.” The exhibition takes that feeling seriously. Painting and sculpture sit close, as clear pairs or in open constellations, allowing echoes to build across material, rhythm, and tone.

Lucas’s contribution also carries a deep history with Contemporary Fine Arts, following collaborations that began in the mid-1990s. Spanning sculpture, photography, and installation, her work is known for incisive humour and for transforming found objects into charged figures. The body, in its many guises, remains her central subject. In Blue Bunny (2025), an anthropomorphic figure reclines on a chair, extending Lucas’s distinctive visual language with a touch of surrealism. Gendered materials such as high heels and nylon stockings become cues that feel bold and exposed, confident and tender at once.

Hambling brings painting into the exhibition as a form of intimacy and encounter. A trailblazing artist and queer icon, she returns again and again to love and remembrance, often through portraiture. For Hambling, painting is a physical partnership with the medium itself. As she puts it, “Oil paint is very alive, sexy stuff. I have to make love with it.” In OOO LA LA, that sensual materiality becomes a way of holding time, attention, and affection.

Portraiture is a key thread of the exhibition, including works each artist has made of the other, in their own signature styles. They describe portrait-making as an intense, immersive act, with the thrill of risk and the promise of reward. During their collaboration, Hambling realised it was the first time she had truly seen Lucas in action. She responded with Sarah at work (2025), attempting to catch Lucas’s energy and concentration. A second portrait,Sarah laughing (2025), embraces the release of expression and the pleasure of unguarded presence.

Smoking, another habit they share, becomes an unexpected link across sculpture and painting. Lucas portrays Hambling with this in mind in Maggiesque (2025), a figure holding a cigarette, and in a new portrait titled Maggi the Magi (2026) made from cigarettes on brown paper. The gesture is affectionate and precise, turning a daily ritual into image, and an image into trace.

OOO LA LA is, at its core, an exhibition about making things vivid again. It understands practice as a repertoire that must remain alive, refreshed through experimentation, and renewed through friendship. The result is a show that feels present tense, full of warmth, bite, and the pleasure of two artists meeting again in public.

Text by Nicolas Vamvouklis

Maggi Hambling *1945 in Sudbury
Sarah Lucas *1962 in Holloway, London
They both live and work in London and Suffolk.