Sarah Lucas and Maggi Hambling on What Makes a Great Portrait

British artists Sarah Lucas and Maggi Hambling, who met by chance on their shared birthday in the infamous Colony Room Club in London’s Soho 25 years ago, have long explored the contours and challenges of what it takes to make a portrait of another person. Lucas, who is best known as a sculptor, adopts everything from cigarettes to balloons in her evocation of the absurdities and banalities of the human experience, while Hambling applies paint to canvas in whorls and handprints that are as tactile as they are suggestive of an interior emotional life. 

Their longstanding friendship is the driving force behind a new creative collaboration which sees the pair present OOO LA LA, a joint exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts (CFA) in Berlin. The exhibition builds upon a presentation first developed in London with Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects, arriving in Berlin in a new form with recent works and a configuration conceived for the gallery space. “In a portrait, you have to stop being yourself, and you have to throw all your own shit out so that the truth about the person can come through you and out into the work,” says Hambling. “You become a channel for that person.”

Since their meeting in London, both artists have relocated to rural Suffolk, where they each work independently. The resulting works produced for their latest exhibition are not the result of an explicit creative collaboration but of two distinct voices operating in parallel, generating both contrasts and surprising synergies of rhythm and tone. “It felt almost as if Sarah was working up one end of a studio and I was working down the other,” says Hambling, “which of course is very far from the truth. Sarah’s her own person in her own studio and so am I in mine. But people said this conversation that went on between Sarah’s sculptures and my paintings was rather loud.”

Lucas and Hambling (both longtime smokers) are alert to the coexistence of sex and death, aptly captured in the destructive allure of a cigarette. In Maggi the Magi (2026), a new portrait of Hambling by Lucas, cigarettes are placed on brown paper to create an alternative impression of the artist. “There were moments when I was making the cigarette portrait where I just felt so close to what you were like,” says Lucas to Hambling. “That’s the thing about portraits. You’re actually trying to capture something that you see about the person, and it’s not enough just to do it; you’ve got to really get in it.”

While in Sarah at Work (2025), Hambling captures the motions of Lucas in the studio in an abstracted conjuring of the artist in a state of frenzied activity. “This is about the third portrait of Sarah that I’ve done, but the first two were absolute crap and they got overworked and overworked. A painting comes alive and dies a lot of times, and if it finally dies it has to kick the bucket,” says Hambling. “This portrait came about after Sarah had been casting my feet. I saw her in a new light, not just as a great person to have a drink with, but the energy and concentration of her at work. That’s what the painting of her is about.” 

The two artists sat down with Ocula at Hambling’s studio in Suffolk to reflect together on their latest exhibition at CFA, reveal the secret to a great portrait, and offer some advice to a new generation of artists. The resulting conversation is unguarded, frank, and full of laughs—much like the pair’s friendship. —[O]