Sarah Lucas, Self-portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996

Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel

  • This is a past exhibition

The first American survey of one of the UK’s most influential artists.

Over the past 30 years, Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, London, UK) has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, Lucas has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as furniture, cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into absurd and confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire.

Initially associated with a group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), who began exhibiting together in London in the late 1980s, Lucas is now one of the UK’s most influential artists. Bringing together more than 130 works in photography, collage, sculpture, and installation, Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel reveals the breadth and ingenuity of the artist’s practice. The exhibition addresses the ways in which Lucas’s works engage with crucial debates about gender and power--with a particular attentiveness to the legacy of surrealism—from her clever modifications to  everyday objects to her exploration of sexual ambiguity and the tension between the mundanely familiar and the disorientingly strange.

Alongside new sculptural works created for the exhibition, Au Naturel features some of Lucas’s most important projects, including early sculptures from the 1990s that substitute domestic furniture for human body parts and enlarged spreads from tabloid newspapers from the same period that reflect objectified representations of the female body. In addition to the photographic self-portraits that Lucas has produced throughout her career, the exhibition features biomorphic sculptures including her stuffed-stocking Bunnies (1997–ongoing) and NUDS (2009–ongoing), the Penetralia series (2008–ongoing), and selections from her installations at the Freud Museum in London (2000) and the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). These works, which complicate inscribed codes of sexual and social normativity, have never been shown together in the United States.

Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel is organized by the New Museum, New York. The exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Margot Norton, Curator. The Hammer's presentation is organized by Anne Ellegood, senior curator, with Nika Chilewich, curatorial assistant.

Public tours of the exhibition are offered every Saturday at 1 p.m. through August 31, 2019.

Sarah Lucas: One Thousand Eggs for Women

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This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Lead support is provided by the Artemis Council of the New Museum. Generous support is provided by Shane Akeroyd, Ellen and Michael Ringier, Caisa and Åke Skeppner, and Elham and Tony Salamé. Additional support is provided by D.Daskalopoulos Collection, Carol and Arthur A. Goldberg, Wendy Fisher, the Henry Moore Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and Nion McEvoy.

Major support of the Hammer Museum’s presentation of Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel is provided by the Hammer Global Council. Generous support is also provided by Dori and Charles Mostov and by the Kerry and Simone Vickar Family Foundation.

Media sponsorship is provided by The Wall Street Journal.
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