Lucas, Sarah, 1962-

Sarah Lucas (born 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 by incorporating photography, collage and found objects. Lucas was born in London, England in 1962. She left school at 16, returning to study art at The Working Men's College (1982–83), London College of Printing (1983–84), and Goldsmith's College (1984–87), graduating with a degree in Fine Art in 1987; Lucas was included in the 1988 group exhibition Freeze along with contemporary artists including Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst, and Gary Hume. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Lucas frequently employs a critical humor in her work in order to question conventions and highlighting the absurdity of the everyday. One of Lucas’ most famous works Two Fried Eggs and Kebab, parodies the traditional still life and evokes similarities between itself and feminist Judy Chicago’s infamous piece The Dinner Party. Feminist reviews often describe Lucas as attempting to add female artists into the canon of art history through her analytical work that predominantly discusses the female body and voyeurism.

Lucas frequently appropriates masculine constructions to confront and dissect their nature.[16] Her pieces represent a fantastical world and playfully employs unrealistic ideals to unearth obscene paradoxes created by those very constructions. Specifically, she is concerned with the casual misogyny of everyday life and employs the conventions of middle class or ‘street’ language to enact her concepts. Her appropriation of masculine symbols such as the phallic banana or ‘fried eggs’ in conjunction with her fearless and dominating gaze, takes ‘female work’ out of the feminine sphere and disrupts the patriarchal power dynamic of the gaze. Works such as The old in Out (1988) is a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and Two Fried Eggs and Kebab (1992) has been linked to Édouard Manet ’s Olympia (1863). While Lucas continues the artistic legacy of feminist artists such as Hannah Wilke, Cindy Sherman, and Rachel Whiteread, her visual language empties femininity of meaning and thus removes her from such a clear ‘feminist art’ title.

Sexuality is not apparent in her works and a lack of association with morality leaves viewers at the free will of her humorous narratives. Lucas takes on the role as a source of reflecting sexism, but not overtly commenting on it. She has stated that, “I am not trying to solve the problem. I’m exploring the moral dilemma by incorporating it”. Her works are both literal and conceptual evidence of Lucas searching for meaning. Whether it is through recognizable forms or her own mythologized fantasies, her ideas constantly build and transform. She appears to never be satisfied with her outcome and scours every imaginable medium for an outlet that is fitting. To her, the artworks she make “…carry on talking and thinking with other people”. Lucas’s practice is then not compulsive ramblings or automatic depictions, but a conscious yearning for a personal sense of happiness.