Sarah Lucas - 701

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Welcome to the exhibition “Sarah Lucas. Sense of Human"—the first exhibition of the British artist in Germany for almost 20 years! Sarah Lucas is one of the most successful artists of her generation—which is why we are especially happy to have won her for a project in the Kunsthalle Mannheim. 

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Born in 1962 in the Holloway district of London, Sarah Lucas studied at the famous Goldsmith College, where she graduated in 1987. Just one year later she was one of the few women artists belonging to a group who achieved recognition as the so-called Young British Artists. These included Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, and Angus Fairhurst, who catapulted London back to the centre of the art world. 

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To this day, Sarah Lucas engages with the body and its social context in sculpture, photography, and installations. She frequently employs humour as an instrument to address themes such as gender equality and questions of social exclusion. In her self-portraits from the 1990s the artist juxtaposed her body and everyday objects . As humorous as they are provocative, she exposes the sexually connoted attributions they contain. Sitting on a chair with legs akimbo, two fried eggs on her breasts for her most well-known work, Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs, or with a grim expression and a cigarette in her mouth for Fighting Fire with Fire, she adopts seemingly male poses in a cheeky and self-assured fashion. From tights, stuffed with soft filling, the artist creates feminine, sometimes fragmented bodies that transition into objects such as chairs. With her so-called Bunnies, she addresses both the gaze on female bodies as well as social ideals of physical beauty. 

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The exhibition brings together works from almost four decades of artistic output and shows how relevant the questions that Sarah Lucas poses continue to be. “Meaning is always up for grabs”, is how she once explained her work process: Meaning is always open, it is  tangible or open to attack, and perhaps can only be grasped through a critical-humorous  examination of reality: In the everyday. In the objects. In the connection of existential and social themes. 

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Lucas links visual word games with fundamental questions about what it is to be human, about love and death, sex and gender, about rules and boundaries in the social structure. Thus the title of the exhibition “Sense of Human” is an apposite description of her oeuvre with its multiple layers of materiality, allusions and references, its psychological and social depths.