Two artists, friends for 35 years, are paired in this joint show that juxtaposes Lucas’s precise and witty sculptures with Hambling’s semi-abstract dollops. Sarah Lucas, now 63, and Maggi Hambling, 80, met at the Colony Room in Soho. Lucas admires Hambling not just as an artist but a woman, and in 'Maggi the Maggi', she has created a loving, heroic image of Hambling’s face made entirely of cigarettes. Hambling returns the compliment with 'Sarah at Work', which, like all her paintings here, is a slapdash mess.
In the latest iteration of her Bunny sculptures, Lucas creates orgiastic hilarity and aesthetic mayhem. These laughable yet tragic creatures render the Playboy Bunny absurdly literal, with limbs, eyes, and nipples everywhere as they pose on concrete chairs. It’s the stuff of the manosphere’s wildest dreams, a lurid monument to hyped-up internet-driven porn. Yet furious feminist satire is just one dimension to Lucas’s extraordinary works. Her splayed anatomically explicit bodies are as desperate and universal as Francis Bacon’s eviscerated people in claustrophobic interiors.
Lucas’s technical skill is evident in 'Ooh La La', an outrageous erotic statue crouched on a hard cold chair, glistening in shades of crimson. Though it looks like latex, it is cast in bronze, lacquered and painted – a sophisticated, crafty way to create something just as raw and vital as her early readymades. One Bunny, collapsed on a chair with arms thrown all over the shop and two sets of balloons, makes you see how she matches Picasso, eye-nipple for nipple-eye. Lucas translates the howl of Picasso’s most furiously misogynistic painting into three dimensions and 21st-century sleaze.
There is a gulf between Lucas and Hambling, and it is not generational. Lucas is precise, witty and intelligent. Hambling’s works are none of those things. Her first big canvas is, at first, impressively wild and turbulent, but it curdles and slumps as you look, its freedom turns out to be mere mess, a pretence of energy. Hambling even shows her sculptures, which are as floppy and false as her paintings. It’s like an art fair where you laugh then you cry at these saucy horrors.
