Sarah Lucas

by Matthew Collings

Sarah Lucas is one of the best known of the so-called young British artists that came to prominence in the 1990s. Active in a variety of media including sculpture, photography and installation, her perennial themes of sex, death, and gender are laced with a bleak humour that gives her work a distinctive and instantly recognisable voice.

Genres: Art

128 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2003

About the author

Matthew Collings is a British art critic, writer, broadcaster, and artist.

Reviews

[Barry Pierce · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fine investigation of Sarah Lucas' work. You're in safe hands with Collings.

[William West · Rating 3 out of 5]

The work of Sarah Lucas strikes me as very British and, outside of sitcoms, that's not a cultural heritage that tends to speak to me. She's ever-so-self-consciously subversive. So much so that I wonder if she isn't semi-literally keeping score with patriarchy, like it and feminism aren't old friends, competing Old-Man-style in the British sense. Don't get me wrong, her work often challenges and sometimes titillates, what with its positing of the feminine as an actor in it's own erotification.

As art-objects, I found some of Lucas's works quite rewarding, such as her Cronenbergianly ambiguous phalo-centric fantasy-bodies made with stuffed nylons. But her series of body-mold sculptures of female models with a cigarette in erotically charged positions struck me as a needlessly repetitive assertion of masculine insistence, and female resistance, or, at least, female re-appropriation of masculine force.