| Sarah Lucas | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1962 London |
| Field | sculpture, |
| Movement | Young British Artists |
Sarah Lucas (born Holloway, London, 1962) is an English artist. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged during the 1990s. Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour, and include photography, collage and found objects.
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Lucas left school at 16; she studied art at The Working Men's College, London College of Printing and Goldsmith's College, graduating with a degree in Fine Art in 1987.
Lucas was included in the 1988 group exhibition Freeze along with contemporaries including Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst, and Gary Hume.[1] In 1990, Lucas co-organized the East Country Yard Show with Henry Bond, in which she also exhibited. Her first two solo exhibitions in 1992 were titled The Whole Joke and Penis Nailed to a Board. For six months in 1993, 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.
Writing in the 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."[2]
In the early 1990s, Lucas began using furniture as a substitute for the human body. 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.
In works such as Bitch (table, t-shirt, melons, and vacuum-packed smoked fish, 1995), she merges tabloid culture with the economy of the ready-made. In earlier work, she had displayed enlarged pages from the Sunday Sport newspaper.
Sarah Lucas is also known for her self-portraits, such as Human Toilet Revisited, 1998, a colour photograph in which she sits on a toilet smoking a cigarette. In her solo exhibition The Fag Show at Sadie Coles in 2000, she used cigarettes as a material, as in Self-portrait with Cigarettes (2000).
In 1996, she was the subject of a BBC documentary, Two Melons and a Stinking Fish. Lucas lives in Suffolk and is represented by Sadie Coles HQ, London, Barbara Gladstone, New York, and CFA Berlin.
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 accompanied exhibitions in less conventional spaces—an empty office building 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.
Lucas’s work has been included in 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 Intelligence—New British Art, 2000, at Tate Britain. In 2003, Sarah Lucas participated in the 50th International Biennale of Art in Venice, 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 Lucas's work.
In the mid-2000s, Lucas was in a relationship with fellow YBA Angus Fairhurst.[3] Lucas now lives with her partner Julian Simmons, in the former residence of Benjamin Britten near Aldeburgh; a home which is "tucked away down a long country lane, behind a Baptist church in Suffolk."[4]
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