Maggie Hambling and Sarah Lucas: Ooo La La review – from the sublime to the ridiculous | Art and design

TThirty-five years ago, young British artists stormed the aging British art world and dropped two fried eggs and a kebab on its top table. Or at least that was the myth. The YBA’s most powerful member, Sarah Lucas, is now 63, her fried eggs and kebabs are art history, and she is a close friend of Maggie Hambling, 80, one of the last painters of the old school. Lucas admires Hambling not only as an artist but as a woman, and in Maggie’s Maggie, she creates an endearingly heroic portrait of Hambling’s face made entirely of cigarettes. Hambling returns the compliment to Sarah in the work, which, like all her paintings here, is a reckless mess. But it’s hard to pay much attention to Hambling’s fat when your eyes are full of balloon breasts (by which I mean breasts molded onto party balloons), bright red asses poking in the air, floppy phallic ears, and long pipe cleaner legs wearing shoes Lucas must have bought in bulk from a fetish store.

In the latest iteration of her bunny sculptures, funny yet tragic creatures that literally make the Playboy Bunny absurd, Sarah Lucas creates ritualistic playfulness and aesthetic chaos. Limbs, eyes and nipples are everywhere as these poor things pose on concrete chairs in a style you might find in a private sex club, or in a male fantasy somewhere. It’s the stuff of the manosphere’s wildest dreams, a lurid monument to Internet porn. However, angry feminist satire is only one dimension of Lucas’s exceptional oeuvre.

We’re told she and Hambling met at the Colony Room in Soho. But while it was Hambling who was a friend of its most famous pioneer, Francis Bacon, it is Lucas with whom he deserves comparison. Their rabbits’ anatomically flattened bodies are as desperate and worldly as their disemboweled people in their claustrophobic interiors. This prison of pornography becomes a picture of hell as stunning as any Bacon painting: you laugh and then cry at these salacious atrocities. A psychopathic girl curled up in the corner looking at you with pity from her squinted eyes, a cigarette in a short paw.

But I’d be lying if I said I spent this exhibition in a desperate state of soul-searching in the male mind. Instead, I was thrilled by Lucas’ creativity. At one point, she parodied the properties of sculpture with ready-mades such as Au Naturel, which suggests a male and female with two oranges and a cucumber next to a tin bucket and a pair of watermelons. Now she creates complex and technically challenging sculptural masterpieces, like the Ooh La La that jumps out at you as soon as you walk into Sadie Coles HQ.

This outrageously sexy statue with shades of Allen Jones, sitting on a cold, hard chair, shining with crimson shades, looks like it’s made of latex. In fact, they are cast in bronze, painted and painted – a sophisticated and crafty method of creating something just as raw and vibrant as her early ready-made works. While some members of her generation turned away from conceptual art or became self-parodies, Lucas has grown without betraying her roots: she combines art and reality in more startling ways than ever before, with physical extremes and startling turns. One bunny, collapsed on a chair with her arms flung all over the store and two sets of balloons – which could be breasts or eyes – make you see how she matches Picasso, tit for tit. In fact, this appears to be a parody of his most misogynistic painting, the 1929 “Great Nude on a Red Chair” in the Musée Picasso. Lucas translates the howls of this angry portrait of Picasso’s wife Olga into three dimensions and 21st-century corruption. The two artists meet as fellow connoisseurs of the deviant and the real. And Lucas is very funny, did I mention that?

There’s a gap between her and Hambling and it’s not generations. Lucas is meticulous, intelligent and intelligent. Hambling’s works are none of those things. Her first large canvas is, at first, admirably wild and turbulent – ​​an almost abstract collection of moody marks – but somehow it coagulates and falls when you look at it, and its freedom turns out to be just chaos, a pretense of energy. This was done in 2012, years before the highly publicized incident in which she lost a finger. And this flabby feeling of uselessness gets worse. Hambling even displays her sculptures, which are as flexible and false as her paintings. It’s like an art gallery where you might see art of largely incompatible genres and themes grouped together – except here it’s not commerce, but an emotional connection between the artists that creates this ironic juxtaposition. But if this friendship has helped maintain Lucas’s artistic brilliance, who am I to question it?