Sarah Lucas

The Goss-Michael Foundation is pleased to present the work of prominent YBA, Sarah Lucas. Her work confronts big, unwieldy questions – from sex and mortality to the underlying function of the work of art. Made from an incongruous range of found objects and materials – cigarettes, concrete, wax – Lucas’s art is imbued with a defiant, base materialism. Her visual language is playfully symbolic, ranging from coarse puns to veiled allusions. Lucas celebrates yet also satirizes the stereotype of the macho male and uses words as an important additional raw material – the titles are often as basely embellished as the objects. Bawdy and provocative, Lucas’s work has a spirit of dissent – whatever the seriousness of the subject matter it sets out to address.

Sarah Lucas came to prominence in the 1990s as a leading figure of the Young British Artists (the YBAs). Her work quickly achieved international recognition for a beguiling capacity to provoke moral indignation at the same time as amusement. She was born in Holloway, London, 1962, and studied at Goldsmith’s College. She was included in the ground-breaking group exhibition, Freeze, in 1988, with contemporaries including Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst, and Gary Hume. Her work has been included in most major surveys of new British art in the last decade, including Sensation – Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, at the Royal Academy, London, 1997, and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, 1998; and Intelligence – New British Art 2000, Tate Britain, London, 2000. Solo exhibitions include Perceval, Doris C Freedman Plaza, Central Park, New York, 2008; Sarah Lucas, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands, 2006; Sarah Lucas, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich, travelling to Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany, and Tate Liverpool, 2005. Various International group shows include The Third Mind – Carte blanche à Ugo Rondinone, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, 2007; Aftershock: Contemporary British Art 1990-2006, Guangdong Museum of Art, Beijing, China, 2006; and In-A-Gadda-Da-Vidda, with Angus Fairhurst and Damien Hirst, Tate Britain, London, 2004. In 2005, the monograph Sarah Lucas: A Catalogue Raisonné was published by Hatje Cantz and Tate Publications. She lives and works in the UK.

Sarah Lucas