Sarah Lucas - 708

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A bucket, two melons, a cucumber, two oranges and an old mattress—in Sarah Lucas’s works what initially appear as disparate materials and forms condense to form a new contextual meaning. 

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As in the case of the iconic work Au Naturel from the early 1990s: Here that very bucket, the two melons, a cucumber, and two oranges on an old mattress become place holders for body parts and sexual organs. These arrangements appears situative—as if they arose spontaneously—and simultaneously precise and well-founded. In such configurations the materials establish connections, embrace each other with their inscribed meanings, generating something new that points beyond themselves. 

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As in the photographic works, the sculptures establish their own aesthetic, which is not shiny and glossy but raw, flawed, direct. And honest. And nevertheless, her objects are characterised by their own, unruly elegance through which Sarah Lucas addresses and develops the fundamental questions of sculpture. 

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It is the handling of the tactile and the visual characteristics of surfaces and forms, with space and mass, with the concentration of materials and meanings, which places her work in direct connection with modernist developments in 20th century sculpture. Associations can be drawn with Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, whose anthropomorphic works are also represented in the collection of the Kunsthalle Mannheim.