Sarah Lucas - 704

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Photographed at a slight angle from above, Sarah Lucas sits casually in an armchair. She is looking directly out of the picture at the viewers with a serious, somewhat enigmatic expression. She has adopted a typical macho pose: the arms extended expansively, placed on the chair’s arm rests, demanding space, the legs opened wide, protruding to the edges of the picture. The fried eggs placed on the artist’s breasts are examples of something she employs repeatedly in her works: Everyday objects as equivalents for sexual attributes, thus undermining normative codes and gender constructions in a playful, post-Freudian fashion, and exposing social conditionings. 

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In such photographic works the artist herself becomes a temporary sculpture—in combination with things which she has arranged alongside or on her feminine-androgynous body. The chequered flooring, traditionally used as a floor covering in kitchens—in other words that area of the house or apartment which, since Romanticism, has been attributed to the woman—functions here as a form of stage with Sarah Lucas herself as the central figure in the middle of the room. 

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What does this work speak of when—28 years after its creation—we look at it in 2024? The feminist critique of conventional gender roles has developed since then. We have seen successes, but also setbacks on the issue of equal rights. Binary constructions of gender have been made increasingly permeable. Feminism is conceived in increasingly intersectional terms. And nevertheless, patriarchally structured society remains the reality. 

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Sarah Lucas separates such masculinities from the male body, makes them visible as constructions by adopting them as a woman and performing them in her works. At the same time, she liberates her identity as a woman from the tyranny of the code and the symbolic language of gender. Thus in her works she moves both wildly and elegantly through the projected attributions and social models with which hegemonic masculinity and normative femininity are formed—and shows that sexism and misogyny are elements of these gender constructions.

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“I quite like insinuating myself into blokiness, definitely. I do love it. I love all the banter. That's why I would say something spurious, like 'I'm a better bloke than most blokes'. But it adds so much to the work I do that I'm a woman doing it. And that fascinates me, why it should be so much more powerful because I'm gender-bending, in a way. But it is.“