Sarah Lucas

The theme was '50', to acknowledge the 50th anniversary of Koestler Trust and Lucas was 50 years old at the time.

Sarah Lucas (born 1962) is an English artist.

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 Goldsmiths College (1984–87), graduating with a degree in Fine Art in 1987.

She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged in 1988.

Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour by incorporating photography, sculpture, collage and found objects.

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.

It was in the early 1990s when Lucas began using furniture as a substitute for the human body, usually with crude genital punning.

Her first two solo exhibitions in 1992 were titled The Whole Joke and Penis Nailed to a Board.

Lucas had her first solo exhibition in 1992 at City Racing, an artist run gallery in south London, and her first solo show in New York at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in 1995.

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.

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.

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'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 1996, she was the subject of a BBC documentary, Two Melons and a Stinking Fish.

One-person museum exhibitions at Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, at Portikus in Frankfurt, at Museum Ludwig in Cologne and at Kunsthalle Zürich, 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.

Sarah Lucas is also known for her 'Artist as Subject' approach where she produced a series of 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).

And in 2001, Sarah Lucas used Neon tubes for her artwork 'New Religion' in which a transparent coffin has been lit up violet.

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.

It was later acquired by George Michael in 2004.

From October 2005 to January 2006, Tate Liverpool presented the first survey exhibition of Lucas's work.

Lucas' 2006 sculpture of a life-size bronze horse and cart, Perceval, is situated in Cullum Street, London.

Writing in 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."

In 2012 Lucas curated Free, an exhibition at the Southbank Centre by the Koestler Trust.

The annual exhibition displays art works by prisoners, detainees and ex-offenders.

In 2013 the Whitechapel Gallery in East London hosted a retrospective of Lucas' work.

In 2015 Sarah Lucas represented Britain at the 56th Venice Biennale with SCREAM DADDIO. She was interviewed by close friend Don Brown during the installation of the exhibition.

In September 2018, The New Museum presented the first American survey of Lucas' work in the exhibition "Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel".

Lucas has also created new sculptural works for the exhibition, including This Jaguar's Going to Heaven (2018), a severed 2003 Jaguar X-Type—the car's back half burned and its front half collaged with cigarettes—and VOX POP DORIS (2018), a pair of eleven-foot-tall thigh-high platform boots cast in concrete.

The exhibition traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in June 2019.

The National Gallery of Australia's 2021-22 Know My Name Exhibition Part Two features the work Installation of Project 1: Sarah Lucas, as well as her first self-portraits, Eating a Banana.

Numerous works by Lucas feature in the exhibition Big Women at the firstsite gallery in Colchester in the UK in Spring 2023.

In September 2023 an exhibition of her work opened at the Tate Britain.

Lucas frequently employs a critical humour 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.