Viewing OOH LA LA: Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas at Sadie Coles

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.