Artist 114
Sarah Lucas
Metaphorical
Sculpture
Sarah Lucas (born 1962) is an contemporary British artist known for her kinesthetic photographs, performances, and sculpture. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged during the 1990s. The artist currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom.
Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour, and include photography, collage and found objects. Appropriating commonplace materials, the artist creates crude and often inflammatory comments on sexuality, death, and gender.
It was in the early 1990s when Lucas began using furniture as a substitute for the human body, usually with crude genital punning.
Created for a show organised by fellow artist Georg Herold at Portikus, Au Naturel (1994) is an assemblage of objects—a mattress, a bucket, a pair of melons, oranges and a cucumber—that suggest male and female body parts.
Through her career, Lucas has continued to appropriate everyday materials (including, for example, freshly made fried eggs) to make works that use humour, visual puns and sexual metaphors of sex, death, Englishness and gender.
Writing in The Guardian, in 2011, Aida Edemariam said that "Lucas was the wildest of the Young British Artists, partying hard and making art that was provocative and at times genuinely shocking.”
Lucas has made art that playfully, and deliberately, countered male depictions of the female body, then went on to pierce the priapic consciousness of so much that came before her.
She’s an artist who can evoke sexual relations in witty, scabrous sculptures that simultaneously comment on class and consumerism while paying heed to formal considerations as well. The abject is invoked in a subtle way playing on what is ‘other’ in societal expectations.
Sources Consulted:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/abject-art
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Lucas
http://www.artnet.com/artists/sarah-lucas/
https://www.google.com/…/rude-genius-sarah-lucas-solo-show-…
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