The prospect of revisiting old rebel artists can induce a particular species of dread in the gallery-goer—the sneaking suspicion that yesterday’s rebelliousness is now preserved in institutional amber, all provocation drained of its sting. Or maybe that’s just me.
Walking through the twin spaces of Sadie Coles HQ and Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert on Bury Street - for this is a show spread across two galleries - one braces oneself for precisely this letdown. It's a relief, then, to discover that both Sarah Lucas and Maggi Hambling—working now in their seventh and ninth decades respectively—have produced work that bristles with an almost mischievous vitality.
The exhibition, which spans galleries on opposite sides of the road, somehow gains rather than loses from this split; the walk between the two spaces on Bury Street becomes part of the work’s rhythm, a spatial punctuation that invites contemplation.
What strikes one immediately is not the weight of their respective legacies, but the particular conversation unfolding between them. These are artists who have known each other for a quarter-century, having met on their shared birthday—23 October—at the Colony Room Club in Soho in the year 2000. That shared birthday seems almost too neat to be true, yet here it looks like something more compelling than coincidence: a genuine artistic communion that crackles on every wall. The works speak to one another across mediums and materials—colour answers colour, form echoes form, and beneath it all runs a current of something more elusive: a shared understanding that perhaps we do not understand one another at all, which makes the attempt to do so all the more worthwhile.
Sarah Lucas’s vocabulary remains defiantly her own: the employment of commonplace, even quotidian objects transformed into something unsettlingly animate. Tights stretch and strain across wooden chairs; cigarettes protrude with aggressive intentionality; toilets sit as both mundane bathroom fixtures and somehow, improbably, as vessels for profound meditation on bodily autonomy and death. This is art that refuses metaphor even as it trades entirely in metaphor—a contradiction so complete that it becomes truth. The crassness is deliberate, even aggressive; the directness punishes our attempts to read something more “elevated” into the work. One cannot safely retreat into interpretive comfort with a Sarah Lucas piece. What makes these sculptures and assemblages so deeply unsettling is precisely this literalness. She presents us with herself and her materials without apology, without the consoling mediation of artistic distance. We are left holding the bag, so to speak, and the bag contains something rather unwelcome.
Maggi Hambling’s paintings, by contrast, surge with the expressionist energy of someone painting as though the canvas might vanish at any moment—as though this gesture, this stroke, this particular shade might be the last one ever attempted. There is an urgency here that is the velocity of absolute commitment. The affinities between these two artists—their “sense of life’s proximity to death,” as the press material baldly puts it —emerge not through melancholy or morbidity but through something far more unexpected: an almost defiant optimism. Both Lucas and Hambling appear genuinely buoyant, genuinely animated by the act of making, and perhaps there lies the paradox at the exhibition’s core. Here are two artists for whom mortality is not an abstraction to be aestheticised but rather a practical reality to be simply lived with, and having accepted this fact, they carry on with remarkable lightness.
Questions about the exhibition’s thematic architecture—its supposed meditation on death and finitude, as intended by the gallery—seemed to catch the artists themselves unaware. There is something rather touching about this apparent obliviousness. Hambling, at eighty, remains visibly unburdened by such theoretical scaffolding; asked about her religious beliefs, she offered the rather brilliant observation that she “only believes in Jesus on Good Friday.” Such certainty in uncertainty, such confidence in the face of the unanswerable, suggests that these artists have transcended the need to provide answers. They simply continue making—which may, in the end, be answer enough.
The collaboration between Sadie Coles, who has worked with Lucas since the beginning of her career, and Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert initially seemed an unlikely pairing. Yet the arrangement works rather better than one might anticipate. The geometry of Bury Street becomes part of the exhibition’s syntax; moving between the two galleries becomes itself an act of aesthetic participation. One emerges not from two separate shows but from something more singular: a demonstration that friendship between artists, across decades and disciplines, can generate something neither could quite accomplish alone.
20th November - 24 January 2026 Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Projects
© The Standard Ltd