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Sarah Lucas (born Holloway, London, 1962) is a contemporary British artist. One of the leading figures in the generation of young British artists who emerged during the 1990s, she has gained an international reputation for provocative works that frequently employ coarse visual puns and a defiant, bawdy humour. Her works span the media of photography, collage and found objects. Sarah Lucas lives and works in London and is represented by Sadie Coles HQ, London, Gladstone Gallery, New York, and CFA Berlin.
Biography
Sarah Lucas studied art at The Working Men's College, London College of Printing and Goldsmith's College, graduating in 1987. She was included in the ground-breaking group exhibition Freeze the following year, along with contemporaries including Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst, and Gary Hume. She emerged as one of the major Young British Artists during the 1990s, with a body of highly provocative work. In the early 1990s she began using furniture as a substitute for the human body, usually with crude genital punning.
Her first two solo exhibitions in 1992 were presciently titled The Whole Joke and Penis Nailed to a Board. For six months in 1993, Sarah Lucas and fellow artist Tracey Emin rented a retail space in east London - "The Shop" - where they made artworks, ranging from printed mugs to T-shirts with slogans, and put them on sale.
Through her career, Lucas has continued to appropriate everyday materials to make works that use humour, visual puns and sexual metaphor to discuss sex, death, Englishness and gender.
In works such as Bitch (table, t-shirt, melons, vacuum-packed smoked fish - 1995), she merges low-life misogynist tabloid culture with the economy of the ready-made, with the intention of confronting sexual stereotyping. As with earlier works in which she had displayed enlarged pages from the Sunday Sport newspaper, the intention was to attack stereotyping on its own ground, using a base language given critical viability by an affinity to previous movements such as Situationism and Surrealism.
Sarah Lucas is also known for her confrontational self-portraits, such as Human Toilet Revisited (1998; London, Tate), a colour photograph in which she sits on a toilet smoking a cigarette. In her solo exhibition The Fag Show (London, Sadie Coles, 2000), she explored her obsession with cigarettes as a material for art, suggesting the connection between smoking and sexually obsessive activity. Self-portrait with Cigarettes (2000 makes a connection between the obsessional, introverted activities of smoking and drawing.
The morbidity and provocative nature of her work has often elicited comparisons with Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst; her androgynous occupation of this masculine low-life domain gives her work much of its critical character. In 1996 she was the subject of a BBC documentary, Two Melons and a Stinking Fish.
One-person museum exhibitions at Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, at Portikus in Frankfurt, and at The Ludwig Museum in Cologne and the recent survey exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich, Kunstverein am Hamburg and Tate Liverpool have been augmented by exhibitions in less conventional spaces: the empty office building near for The Law in 1997; a disused postal depot in Berlin for the exhibition Beautiness in 1999; and an installation at the Freud Museum called Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 2000.
Sarah Lucas’s work has been included in most major surveys of new British art in the last decade including Brilliant! - New Art From London at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1995, Sensation - Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy in 1997, and more recently Intelligence - New British Art 2000 at Tate Britain. In 2003 Sarah Lucas participated in the 50th International Biennale of Art in Venice and Outlook: Contemporary Art in Athens, and In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, a three person exhibition for Tate Britain with Angus Fairhurst and Damien Hirst in 2004. From October 2005 to January 2006, Tate Liverpool presented the first survey exhibition of Sarah Lucas's work.
One person publications include the artist’s catalogue raisonne (1989-2005) which accompanied the survey exhibition in 2005, plus the recent artist’s book, GOD IS DAD, along with monographs by Tate Publishing in 2002, Tecla Sala, Barcelona in 2000 and Boyman’s van-Beuningen in 1994.
Further Reading Yilmaz Dziewior & Beatrix Ruf (eds.), Sarah Lucas: Exhibitions and Catalogue Raisonné 1989 – 2005 (Osfildern-Ruit / London: Hatje Cantz Verlag / Tate Publishing), 2005
Sarah Lucas and Olivier Garbay, God is Dad (London: Sadie Coles HQ and Koenig Books), 2005
Matthew Collings, Sarah Lucas (London: Tate Publishing), 2002
Parkett, 45, 1995, pp. 76–115 [five articles by various authors]
M. Sladen: ‘Vice and Versatility', A. Press, 214, June 1996, pp. 36–41. Sarah Lucas (exh. cat., Rotterdam: Mus. Boymans—van Beuningen) 1996.
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