An in-depth conversation with Sarah Lucas about her life and work. Lucas, born in London in 1962, is one of the most significant artists of her generation, both in Britain, where she was associated with the 1990s movement known as the Young British Artists, and internationally, where she has been the subject of several significant recent institutional exhibitions. Her practice primarily consists of sculpture, but it is often presented in distinctive installations in dialogue with photography, in the form of prints or wallpaper. Her work is characterised by sardonic and ribald humour, informed by colloquial British language but also shot through with feminist theory and social commentary. Formed from a wealth of materials, many of them everyday found objects like newspapers, food, furniture, cigarettes and clothing, her sculptures almost always evoke the body, however crudely reduced or abstracted. And while a humdrum frankness and bawdiness are ever-present, Lucas’s sense of the strange and the uncanny locate her work within the legacies of Dada, Surrealism and absurdist art in Europe and the US. She discusses her innovative approach to exhibition-making, and the liberating collaborations with Franz West that influenced them. She discusses how Yoko Ono informed some of her recent work. She reflects on an anarchic collaboration with the Austrian collective gelitin. Plus, she gives insight into her working practices and studio life.
Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas, Tate Britain, London, until 14 January 2024.
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