[ad_1]
In a craggy cave a hundred feet below the Forest of Dean, Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas are standing in front of Hambling’s huge white fibreglass sculpture Henrietta Eating a Meringue (2001), which emerges from the gloom like a ghostly vortex. The piece was inspired by the idea of Hambling’s late lover and muse Henrietta Moraes biting into a sugary whorl in defiance of her diabetes. “It looks like part of the caves, for some reason,” Hambling remarks. Lucas agrees. “I really wanted you to see it – it looks so different here from anywhere else.” In another of Clearwell’s shadowy caverns, we are stopped in our tracks by Lucas’ most recent painted bronze “bunny” sculpture, a shining, sinuous blood-red personage – in towering aubergine-coloured ankle boots – that slithers down the back of a concrete chair. “She’s called She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” Lucas tells us.
Sarah Lucas (left) and Maggi Hambling photographed in the Suffolk countryside
As well as starring in this subterranean West Country group show, organised over the summer by Gallery Pangolin, both these dramatic sculptures – or versions of them – will feature in a joint exhibition of Hambling and Lucas’ work opening in London in November. This runs across their galleries, Sadie Coles HQ (Hambling) and Frankie Rossi Art Projects (Lucas), which are conveniently situated opposite each other on either side of Bury Street, St James’s. The smaller plaster maquette for Hambling’s Henrietta is slated for inclusion, along with the Lucas bunny we have just seen. Another dead cert is Hambling’s epic Wall of water XXII (2012), one of a series originally made in response to a violent storm she witnessed in the coastal town of Southwold near her Suffolk home. According to them both, the painting’s cascading brushstrokes and flashes of scarlet and purple are also reminiscent of a cancan dancer, and this association fed into the looping limbs and vivid colours of Lucas’ new bunny.
“We haven’t actually chosen all [the pieces for] the show yet,” admits Lucas. The three of us are now above ground and puffing on an illicit cigarette, guiltily provided by me as the pair are both supposed to have given up smoking. “I’m presenting all these thoughts to Maggi, and I’ve got all these things on the go, but until just now, in the caves there’s been no actual stuff for her to see,” she explains. “Sarah’s a bit last minute dot com,” adds Hambling with an affectionate eye roll. But they have at least decided on an exhibition title, “OOO LA LA”. ‘It’s got all the OOO that Maggi likes, and I’m the LA LA,” says Lucas, with Hambling adding: “It’s also a bit camp, which is very nice.”
Maggi Hambling’s cover for Bazaar Art 2025
This joint enterprise is testament to a deep friendship that stretches back more than 20 years. “I’ve always liked Sarah the best [out] of the YBAs and she’s not against me, I don’t think,” Hambling observes drily, while Lucas flashes a gold-toothed grin.
Yet, while they might be fond friends, they talk about it rarely. “We do love and respect each other – but it all sounds so corny, doesn’t it?” says Hambling, when I catch up with her later on her own. “Sarah just gets my work and I get hers.” So, why is Lucas her favourite YBA? “The humour and the guts of her work. Anyway, apparently we’re the two bad girls of British art,” Hambling adds, with heavily ironic emphasis. Despite a snort of derision accompanied by one of her famously beady glares, she doesn’t seem too unhappy with the label.
Certainly, neither has shied away from confounding conventions. Hambling is now renowned as the famously gruff and formerly aggressively chain-smoking painter of dynamic portraits of everyone from her father on his deathbed to Stephen Fry, Max Wall and Andy Murray. She was the very first artist in residence at the National Gallery – between 1980 and 1981 – and has made paintings devoted to bulls, wars, laughs, sunrises and waves, as well as the sound of the wind and the song of a nightingale. “There are no rules,” she once told me. “I paint whatever happens in life.” When she nearly died from a heart attack in the spring of 2022, the result was a series of tumultuous torrents collectively titled “Maelstrom”. Then in October last year, she marked the death of Tory Lawrence, her “person” (she hates the word partner) of 40 years, by immediately going into the studio and producing a watery-blue portrait of Lawrence that “just painted itself, as the best paintings do – I had nothing to do with it”. Last November, she lost her little finger from her right painting hand in an accident, but was characteristically stoic about this potential disaster, claiming that her daily ritual of making a drawing with her left hand meant that she was already ambidextrous.
Her often-controversial public sculptures have brought her wider notoriety. These include a bronze rendition of Oscar Wilde who lolls in his coffin, laughing and smoking, near Charing Cross Station, and the giant Scallop on the beach at Aldeburgh in honour of Benjamin Britten, which despite early howls of protest has now become a beloved local landmark. Most recently, Hambling attracted more outrage and ire with her silvered bronze A Sculpture For Mary Wollstonecraft (2020) depicting a small, naked female form atop what looks like a phallic waterjet on Newington Green in north London. Undoubtedly, the criticism stings, but Hambling doesn’t let on. “When something goes out into a public place, it’s not up to you anymore – whatever happens, happens,” she says.
Sarah Lucas’ cover for Bazaar Art 2025, photographed by Julian Simmonds
Lucas also likes “to mix things up”, as she puts it. Since she emerged in the 1990s at the centre of the hard-partying YBA generation, alongside her good friend and fellow Goldsmiths College classmate Damien Hirst, she has been embraced by the establishment, representing Britain at the 2015 Venice Biennale and having numerous solo shows, most recently at Tate Britain in 2023. From the start, her work was distinguished by a deft and audaciously inventive use of unexpected materials – eggs, cigarettes, toilets, old furniture, pantyhose, beer cans – to prod at sexual stereotypes and notions of taste and acceptability. And she’s showing no sign of stopping. There’s a clear connection between Lucas’ infamous Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992) – a provocative parody of the female form, laid out on a battered table – and the plastercasts of her woman friends’ naked lower bodies, with real cigarettes cheekily inserted into various orifices, that were shown in Venice nearly two decades later. “Early on I wanted to keep things simple, rough and ready, with almost a kind of anti-style,” she once said to me. “I like the idea of keeping things together just with ideas and attitude.”
Attitude is something both Lucas and Hambling have in abundance – as is conviviality, lubricated by their shared fondness for a glass or two. Fittingly, the formidable duo first met in the Colony Room, the notorious Soho watering hole favoured by hard-drinking artists from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst. It was the early 2000s and they were brought together by their mutual friend Sebastian Horsley, the late artist and self-styled “Dandy in the Underworld”. Neither can recall the year, but both know the exact day. “Sebastian came into the Colony with Maggi,” remembers Lucas, “and it turned out it was both Maggi’s birthday and mine, 23 October.” “Yes, we share the same birthday, with a few years between,” observes Hambling, who turns 80 this year to Lucas’ 63. “We sort of fell into each other’s arms.”
But it was only when Lucas moved to Suffolk, the county where Hambling was born, brought up and already based, that their friendship deepened. Originally the most urban of artists, Lucas relocated to the countryside gradually, beginning with a weekend retreat in Benjamin Britten’s former house that she bought with her gallerist Sadie Coles in 2007. “I started to really enjoy being here and eventually I was here more and more,” she says, admitting that “I did want to get off the rollercoaster, not just of the art world but also the social circle I was in, which was getting a bit out of hand”. Lucas now lives in a modest farmhouse overlooking cornfields near the small town of Eye with Julian Simmons, her puckish partner, collaborator and co-conspirator. “You’re still just a blow-in,” snorts Hambling, who has been ensconced back in her home county since 1994, when a friend bequeathed her a cottage about half an hour from Lucas in water meadows near the River Alde. Even though they each lead very separate lives, and both still maintain houses in London, they agree that this proximity is important. “Geography makes a difference, as it does in all relationships,” says Lucas. “Doing this show is a good reason to see each other and find out what we are doing, and I’m not going to say no to that, am I?”
Their humour and mutual affection can be seen in two earlier portraits they’ve made of each other. Hambling’s painting Sarah Lucas (2013) shows a framed image of Lucas’ face surveying a giant towering smorgasbord of her key works and motifs – fried eggs, thrusting bananas and cucumbers, a clumped cluster of breasts – all crowned with a penis tip and swathed in cigarette smoke. Lucas’ Maggi(2018) is no less striking, presenting Hambling in the form of an upended lavatory bowl, baring its gaping hole and topped by two glowing lightbulbs dangling from a skirt hanger. “I made it, called it Maggi and it sort of became Maggi,” Lucas told me when I questioned her on a panel a few years ago.
Neither of these works is in “OOO LA LA”, as they are currently in an exhibition of artist portraits at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until 2 November. However, after more drinks and forbidden cigarettes, the duo finally reveal that they are working on two new representations of each other especially for the Coles/Rossi show. I manage to extract that Lucas is making a “sculptural portrait” of Hambling that, this time, will not involve any form of sanitary ware, but will instead be a “soft chair bunny”. As with her earlier toilet bowl, it seems that the work gave rise to the subject, rather than vice-versa, with Lucas saying: “It didn’t start off as a Maggi portrait, but then it just jumped out at me, and when it did, that was the first moment in my whole year when I actually thought, ‘I’m enjoying this!’” Hambling is less fulsome. “Mine is a painting of Sarah and I’m on the second version of it now. I think it’s going to be called Being Sarah Lucas. Now don’t ask any more fucking questions!” And with that, she goes off to get herself another drink.
“OOO LA LA: Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas” is at Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects from 20 November until January 2026. “Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists” is at Pallant House Gallery until 2 November.
This feature is originally featured in the 2025 edition of Bazaar Art. Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas’ Bazaar Art covers are now on newsstands.
[ad_2]
Source link
Other Articles
Local artists launching pop-up gallery at Orillia Square mall
17 artists present paper artworks in new exhibition
No Comment! Be the first one.