BOOK:Sarah Lucas-Au Naturel,Phaidon Publications

Sarah Lucas arrived on the English Art Scene via the 1988 group exhibition “Freeze”, alongside several other young British artists coming out of Goldsmiths, University of London. Lucas is a feminist who uses humour, irony and sexual paronomasias to explore the everyday English culture and sexual and psychological tensions. Her works reflect and satirise misogynist norms in general life, tabloids and pornography. Featuring eight essays and an interview with the artist, the catalogue “Sarah Lucas-Au Naturel” by Phaidon Publications covers the first major survey in the United States of her work of Sarah spans Lucas’s entire career, bringing together 150 of her most iconic works and series from the late 1980s to today. The exhibition address the ways in which Lucas’s works engage with crucial debates about gender and power, along with the legacy of surrealism, from her clever transformations of everyday objects to her exploration of sexual ambiguity and the tension between the familiar and the disorienting or absurd. The title of the exhibition is taken from her sculpture “Au Naturel” (1994) in which two melons and a bucket alongside two oranges and a cucumber on an old mattress are used to represent a heterosexual couple in bed. Lucas’s shift between high and low art and culture operates as a shift between “high” aesthetic ideas about the art object as a metaphoric play of meaning and its “low” associations with the materiality of the literal object and its allusions to the genitals and sex. Applying the term to Lucas’s greater body of work, the title speaks to the immediacy, intimacy, and directness of her images and speculates on the possibility of a natural state, perhaps without the limitations of established social structures and gender conformity. -Dimitris Lempesis