Sarah Lucas, Red Sky Dah, 2018Kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
As Sarah Lucas’s mammoth new exhibition opens at Tate Britain, co-curator Dominique Heyse-Moore unpacks six key pieces from the artist’s illustrious career
Sarah Lucas has always been a master of suggestion: in her hands, domestic furniture transforms into bodies, nylon tights become skin, raw chickens represent vaginas, while burnt-out cars embody their driver. A Goldsmiths student alongside Damien Hirst, she arrived on the art scene in the late 1980s as an original member of the YBAs – that new generation of artists who became notorious for their anti-establishment approach to imagery and materials.
In the decades since, Lucas’s work has shifted and evolved, encompassing new materials and scales, while her fascination with feminism, Freud, the human body, class, sex and death has endured. An excellent new survey of her work at Tate Britain, Happy Gas, takes viewers on a climactic journey through Lucas’s life and career, punctuated by a plethora of chairs (used to “hang” sculptures), her photographic self-portraits in supersize, which gaze down upon you as you wander the show’s 70-plus works, and intimate wall texts penned by Lucas herself.
Here, to mark the exhibition’s opening, co-curator Dominique Heyse-Moore talks us through six of the show’s key works.
“Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous is one of the earliest works in the show and represents the beginning of a way of thinking and working: there’s innuendo, word-play, looking at representations of the female body. The tabloid works find Lucas reflecting back – on a huge scale, because she’s blown them up on a photocopier – things that were around us all the time back then, on the floor of buses, wrapping our fish and chips. I think they have a new power in their physicality today. It’s still startling to see them on a gallery wall, that challenge to the formality of the gallery space, but there’s another impact in the way they occupy a public space – nowadays, this kind of content is all online, no longer in the streets.”
“This work is classic Lucas. It’s innuendo – the very British title, the added touch that it says ‘Men’ over the public toilet behind – and there’s a directness about the point she’s making. But it’s also about trying on different kinds of gender positions. She’s bending her knees to hold the salmon and it seems quite difficult to prop up. I like that, and the way she’s turned to the side, as opposed to the confidence of Chicken Knickers [hanging opposite, with the aforementioned raw chicken representing a vagina], which is straight on. Then there’s the element of urban grit which is so much part of the persona that surrounded her back then – and the work. The readily available materials: you imagine she just popped down to the market in the morning and bought the salmon, just as you can imagine her getting the tights, eggs or newspapers in the newsagent.”
“This earliest Bunny looks sad – there’s this dejected quality to her, especially in comparison to the recent Bunnies in the second room, which I’ll talk about when we discuss Sugar [see below]. The thing that’s always struck me about all the Bunnies is the vulnerability of the tights. Lucas uses these uncovered breeze blocks throughout the exhibition and there’s a striking juxtaposition between their roughness and the Bunnies’ fragility. Of course, there’s a very careful installation process, but there was always this feeling that the breeze blocks could snag the fragile skin of these figures, who Lucas describes as muses and women.”
“In the show’s catalogue, Amy Emmerson Martin discusses this title as a reference to an early utterance – one of the first things many babies say – and also as an expression of maternal affection. Much of Lucas’s work touches upon Freudian analytic theory in this way – the acquisition and gendering of language. This many-breasted chair is so amazingly too-much, it’s almost smothering. You can imagine disappearing into it. But it’s also placed in the show’s most comforting room, with a peach wall the same colour as the Tits in Space wallpaper [also in the room], plus a self-portrait of Sarah in the rural setting she lives in now, a giant marrow sculpture, a cosy sandwich! Mumum is the centrepiece of this comforting space, but always with that slight twist, the slightly sinister Sarah Lucas edge.”
Sarah Lucas, Red Sky Dah, 2018Kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
Red Sky Dah, 2018
“I relate this piece to the show’s title, Happy Gas. Throughout, we’ve tried to create an atmosphere of being surrounded by this joyous, enveloping happy gas, which is also too much at times, almost self-destructive. The smoke here perhaps hints to nitrous oxide, happy gas.
“Alongside This Jaguar’s Going to Heaven [a burnt-out sedan, sliced in half], this piece concludes the show. We really wanted it to come to a crescendo, a crash, the end of a sex scene. Red Sky has this drama – the red, the smoke swirling – linking it to the cigarette works [many Lucas sculptures feature cigarettes] and also the ejaculatory crescendos in the room. But it also creates a sense of looking back on a practice, even though Sarah is only 60 and very much still working, because it’s one of the more recent self-portraits. It’s important to note here though that Sarah’s self-portraits are always taken by someone else – she sees them as being about relationships, about accident and spontaneity.”
“As I mentioned, Lucas introduces a real exuberance with her later Bunnies. There’s an intention to that shift in her feminism over the years; she talks a lot about the politicising moment when she read Andrea Dworkin in the late 80s, and suddenly felt rage – but she didn’t want to hold onto that rage. So there’s still the Bunnies, still the exploration of women’s sexuality and its performance – it’s still kind of an objectification of it – but it’s shifted. Sadie Coles [Lucas’s gallerist] told me that she thinks of Sugar like a bunch of roses: many breasts sitting on top of those pink-stalk legs, which are kind of bashful, unlike many of the works in the second room. I think it’s really nice to see the endurance of the Bunny throughout Lucas’s practice, incorporating her later experiments with different materials like cast bronze and resin.”
Happy Gas by Sarah Lucas is on show at Tate Britain in London until 14 January 2024.
