Sadie Coles stages an electric encounter between two of Britain’s most vital artists in OOO LA LA, a co-commissioned exhibition by Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects. Set across the two gallery spaces at 8 and 38 Bury Street, the show brings together works by artists with attitude, Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas.

Hambling and Lucas share a birthday – both were born on 23 October – which sparked a long friendship, forged when they met while celebrating their birthdays at the legendary Colony Room Club in Soho in 2000. They both now live in rural Suffolk. Although their practices differ sharply — Hambling’s sweeping, emotionally charged oil paintings of sea, memory and loss; Lucas’s pointed, irreverent sculptures and assemblages of everyday detritus — the show teases out the affinities beneath the difference. At its heart lie questions of mortality and exuberance, of life lived vividly in the face of the inevitable.

Lucas’s work with stuffed tights, fried eggs and worn-furniture — her iconic “Bunny” series — deliberately revives the old and domestic into a state of urgent freshness. Hambling, by contrast, has said painting can produce an “eternal present tense,” making the moment of creation and experience indistinguishable. Viewed together, their works operate as a conversation in space: Hambling’s canvases pulse with immediacy, while Lucas’s sculptures anchor us in the corporeal, the dirty-fingered, the absurd. The personal infuses the formal: both artists use friends, lovers and things close at hand as raw material.

Their friendship, occasionally slyly referenced in the show (each has represented the other in their work), becomes part of the art-making. OOO LA LA is a lively collision of two practised voices still urgent, still mischief-ready.

The Long Now: Saatchi Gallery at 40 (5 November 2025 to 1 March 2026) celebrates a landmark moment for the Saatchi Gallery as it reaches four decades as a contributor to UK culture – and it promises to be far from a standard anniversary show, posing deeper questions about the nature of the gallery model and art practices: what does art look like when it thinks in the long term — which ideas, meanings and materials, endure, decay or transform?

Curated by Philippa Adams, the scope is ambitious: two floors, nine major spaces, a mixture of historic works and new commissions, spanning installation, painting and sculpture. It opens with explorations of process and mark-making, via artists such as Alice Anderson, Rannvá Kunoy and Carolina Mazzolari, before moving through painting (with standout works like Jenny Saville’s Passage from 2004) and into immersive installations – don’t miss Richard Wilson’s 20:50, a chamber filled with recycle engine oil that reflects the architecture like a mirror, shown at the gallery previously but returning here to the top floor for the first time.

Throughout the show, residual themes of climate change, technology, fragility and renewal are threaded via works by, among others, Gavin Turk, Mat Collishaw and Olafur Eliasson – artists who have all been associated with the gallery over the year and have helped define and shape its place as a provocative, experimental space for art. It’s a bold way for Saatchi Gallery to mark forty years—not just by reflecting on forty years of groundbreaking shows, but by looking boldly ahead.