Love, Excess, and the Art of Not Holding Back

A short walk from The Ritz—right along St James’s, left into Jermyn Street, then right again—leads you to Bury Street, one of the densest nodes of London’s commercial art world, running parallel to Duke Street and Mason’s Yard. Through the window of Sadie Coles HQ at number 8, a flash of red immediately catches the eye: glossy liquiform enamel reflects off the exaggerated buttocks of a long-limbed, headless figure perched in stilettos on a concrete chair. Behind it, a large canvas erupts in crimson, its frothing, bilateral marks spiralling with the force of unrestrained desire. Sculpture and painting appear locked in a charged dialogue, each articulating a shared understanding through entirely different means.

At number 38, further down the street, Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, in collaboration with Frankie Rossi Art Projects, presents a companion vision. Here, another hyper-sexualised, unclothed form—save for platform heels and a crumpled bodysuit—crawls over a concrete chair, its body arched provocatively, sausage-like limbs stretching forward. Where a head should be, a pair of full breasts stare outward. Behind this contortion, a diptych of thick red paint reads like the residue of an emotional climax, as though all excess sensation has been absorbed into pigment. The staging is brazen, theatrical, and unapologetically pleasurable.

Together, these scenes form OOO LA LA, a joint exhibition by Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas, spanning both Bury Street galleries. The show is exuberant, confrontational, and profoundly life-affirming, revealing the shared impulses that drive both artists: a persistent awareness of mortality, an embrace of excess, and a refusal to temper their work for comfort or decorum. Quietly, it also performs an act of occupation. Presented by Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects—who regularly collaborate with Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert—the exhibition stretches across both spaces, creating a museum-scale intervention in the heart of London’s dealer district. It has become an unavoidable talking point. By bringing two major figures together in such a public, accessible way, the exhibition opens onto one of the most vital intergenerational conversations in contemporary art—quite literally art history unfolding in real time.

The roots of the exhibition stretch back decades. Hambling and Lucas are said to have met in 2000 at the Colony Room Club on their shared birthday, born seventeen years apart, and have remained close ever since—an unusual longevity in a competitive and often divisive art world. Despite their divergent materials, techniques, and formal approaches, their friendship rests on shared ground: a fascination with sex and desire as absurd performance, a recognition of life’s closeness to death, and a deep resistance to compromise. The works on display are marked by blunt honesty and irreverence, including moments where each artist represents the other. The viewer becomes both witness to their mutual admiration and recipient of rare insight into what drives their respective practices.

One of the most telling works appears in the final room: a one-eyed figure constructed from stockings, wearing battered trainers and clutching a cigarette. It tracks you from every angle. Unlike anything else in the exhibition, it captures a very specific presence—Maggi Hambling herself. That Lucas made this sculpture, and that Hambling allows it to be shown, speaks volumes about the trust between them. Their reciprocal portrayals have surfaced before, including Lucas’s Maggi(2012) and Hambling’s painted portraits of Lucas, shown together in exhibitions such as The Quick and the Dead at Hastings Contemporary (2018) and Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2025). They frequently appear together in public talks, sharing riotous anecdotes while refusing the solemnity often imposed on artistic authority. As Lucas once remarked to Frieze, she doesn’t spend her time “standing around with my hand on my chin looking tough and surly,” while Hambling has noted that her best work happens when she forgets herself entirely.

Given the proximity of their studios in rural Suffolk, the evolution of OOO LA LA feels almost inevitable. The exhibition also reflects a rare level of trust between artists and gallerists, who have allowed the collaboration to unfold without heavy-handed interpretation. There are no didactic wall texts or academic explanations. Instead, the pairing of works—enhanced by carefully chosen wall colours—draws viewers into the conversation without prescribing conclusions. A spirit of generosity runs throughout, as though each artist is intent on gifting the other a measure of freedom. Crucially, theirs is an intergenerational dialogue in which neither needs to compete for historical position; their differences coexist without threat.

Even the title reinforces this openness. OOO LA LA could reference a pop lyric—“Oh la, la, la, it’s the way that you feel when you know it’s real”—or be uttered in mock-French disbelief, or signal something else entirely. It is worth noting that Frankie Rossi Art Projects, founded in 2023 by Frankie Rossi with John Erle-Drax and Geoffrey Parton, is the sole global representative of Frank Auerbach and has longstanding ties to figures such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Barbara Hepworth. Their involvement underscores a shared belief in Hambling’s importance—an artist who remains, arguably, undervalued relative to her peers.

A recent, sharply divided critical response only clarifies the exhibition’s stakes. One prominent critic praised Lucas’s sculptures as expressions of male fantasy while dismissing Hambling’s paintings as chaotic and careless. This imbalance exposes precisely what OOO LA LA confronts: the persistent failure to apply equal critical seriousness to women artists, and the reluctance to engage with the complexity of female friendship, messiness, and refusal. Critics frequently address sex and death, yet rarely reckon with love as a sustaining force. If some miss the joy, pathos, and defiant looseness that animate this exhibition, that absence belongs to them. The work has already secured its own legacy.

Perhaps most radical of all is the time afforded to both artists. The luxury of extended collaboration, of making work together for a central London exhibition without compromise, feels almost avant-garde. OOO LA LA succeeds by acknowledging both contrast and continuity, revealing how each practice reinvents the past while remaining fiercely present. As Lucas has said of her Bunny sculptures, the aim is to return old forms to a state of freshness that speaks to now. Hambling, too, understands painting as an event unfolding in real time—something that makes you feel present at the moment of its creation.

Seen together, their work reminds us that there is no correct way to respond to art. You surrender to it or you don’t. That freedom is the point. Go—quickly—and bring someone you love.

OOO LA LA: Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas

20 November 2025 – 24 January 2026

Sadie Coles HQ & Frankie Rossi Art Projects

8 and 38 Bury Street, SW1Y