Sarah Lucas

Florian and Kevin are two beguiling sculptures that are immediately identifiable as the incisive and humorous work of Sarah Lucas. Through subtle innuendo the British sculptor creates works that challenge our conception of gender, sexuality, and identity. From the outset of her practice, human anatomy has long fascinated Lucas, substituting everyday objects for human body parts often adding a suggestion of genitalia. In her more recent work, the form of the phallus in particular has been a recurring visual motif; and here Lucas’ two monumental, highly-polished bronze works appear as both oversized vegetables and phallic-shaped sculptures. Confronting the viewer as objects that are at once familiar and disorienting, Florian and Kevin perfectly characterise the reflective interplay of Lucas’ practice.

Soaring to prominence in the early 1990s as a founding member of the YBAs (Young British Artists), Lucas’s work has commanded critical and commercial attention since her electrifying debut 25 years ago. Indeed, the past two years have proven to be a milestone moment in the artist’s career as global interest in her work has soared. Confirming the timeless relevance of her work, Lucas was recently featured in two of the most important international surveys of contemporary art: the 2013 Carnegie International and the central exhibition of the 2013 Venice Biennale, Massimiliano Gioni’s The Encyclopedic Palace. Having only recently closed her highly praised retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, this summer Lucas has been accorded the prestigious accolade of representing the United Kingdom at the 2015 Venice Biennale with a solo outing in the halls of the Giardini’s historic British pavilion. Critic Louisa Buck perfectly describes this momentous achievement: ‘[Lucas] has taken the British Pavilion and made it exuberantly – but also surprisingly elegantly – her own… All the galleries have been painted a creamy custard yellow, and populated by white plaster casts of what she calls her ‘muses’, which could be read as the sculptural substitute for the bobbing meringues. Yet this jokiness is just one aspect of what is one of the strongest British Pavilions in recent years, and which confirms Lucas’s strength and maturity as a sculptor… Taking on the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is always a high stakes challenge, and Sarah Lucas has done us – and herself – proud’ (Louisa Buck, ‘Sarah Lucas’s bawdy British Pavilion, Venice Biennale’, in The Telegraph, 8 May 2015, online resource).