Sarah Lucas - 707

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Sarah Lucas was socialised in the white working class of North London, child of the Thatcher era, a time shaped by mass unemployment and mass consumption. It was here that she observed the misogynous modes of depiction in the tabloids, which led her to an engagement with the social treatment of body images: 

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“I was surprised by the nudity, titillation, and hypocritical morality being served up to the people in this country. That seemed to me as good a place to start from as any.”

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At the beginning of the 1990s the artist created the newspaper pieces: For this work series she enlarged pages from newspapers which also included images of pin-up girls: 

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“They were real newspaper pages. I didn’t add or change anything. I just blew them up with an old printer. That was the first work where I knew what I wanted and that it was about my stance, my point of view.”

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Starting from her experiences, the pictorial and linguistic traditions, social manners and body understanding of British society in the late 20th century, Sarah Lucas has developed her work through a precise observation of her environment. She continues these observations to this day, now expressed through an unmistakable iconography. 

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In the meantime, the Morning Sport, the newspaper whose enlarged pages she used for the work group we can see in front of us, has been discontinued. The German equivalent, the topless girls on page three of the BILD newspaper, also belong to the past. Here in the exhibition the works SOD YOU GITS and HUNK OF THE YEAR are hung opposite each other, thus confronting the gaze on the objectified female body with that of the “Man of the Year”.