Maggi Hambling (b. 1945)

Painted from life in Maggi Hambling’s Suffolk studio in 2013, Sarah Lucas (I) is an arresting vision of one of the most iconic and enigmatic of the Young British Artists. The work was shown recently in The Quick & the Dead at the Jerwood Gallery, Hastings (October 2018 - January 2019): this exhibition centred on Hambling’s portraits of Sarah Lucas, Sebastian Horsley, Julian Simmons and Jürgen Teller, juxtaposed with these artists’ own self-portraits, and, in turn their portraits of Hambling herself. In 2012, Sarah Lucas made Maggi – a playful assemblage consisting of a pair of lightbulbs and a toilet bowl suspended from wire – as a representation of Hambling. Hambling reciprocated in 2013 with two portraits of Lucas. In the intensely-worked strokes of oil paint typical of Hambling’s style, Sarah Lucas (I) captures Lucas in intimate close-up – her head framed by a vivid red scarf, a fragment of shoulder, and the hazy, bluish shadow cast by her hair. Her expression is contemplative, her gaze at once glitteringly direct and distinctly inscrutable.