Sarah Lucas United Kingdom, b. 1962

OOPS! and the associated group were first developed by Lucas as part of an ongoing series which was first presented in I SCREAM DADDIO, her exhibition at the British Pavilion in the 56^th Venice Biennale in 2015. Taking these awkward, knotted human-furniture amalgamations, Lucas casts the handmade models in bronze which are then highly polished. OOPS! and other works from this more recent series were exhibited for the first time at the National Gallery of Art in Canberra, Australia as part of Know My Name, a national curatorial and educational project celebrating the diversity of Australian female artists.

Interweaving furniture and the sexual, human body has been an integral part of Lucas’s practise since the 1990s. These bronze-cast humanoids originated in Lucas’s iconic Bunny sculptures (1997 onwards) in which pairs of stuffed nylon tights were attached to chairs to create the impression of suggestive splayed legs. The series NUDs (2009 onwards) used these same everyday materials to create bodies, limbs and teddies out of knots and contortions, bringing together influences from British Modernist sculpture and sexual innuendo.

While her works have often been considered shocking, Lucas says that she sees sex as a method by which her art is relatable and accessible, and that it has the potential to reach people’s deepest, most interior emotions. Like Nicole Wermers uses the reclining female physique as a reference to physical labour, and Keith-Roach explores the practical functions of the maternal vessel, Lucas uses the sexual body as a symbol of both eroticism and humour. Finding hilarity in the sexual form, Lucas takes traditional taboos of Western art (such as genitalia) and pushes it to the extreme, using such random banal items as raw chickens, crushed beer cans and fried eggs as stand-ins for sexual body parts.

A great admirer of Marcel Duchamp, Lucas’s use of the readymade and shock factor has often been compared to the French artist, especially her repeated motif of the toilet. Louise Bourgeois is also a key influence in Lucas’s use of textiles and the feminine, sexual experience, with her undulating, phallic Maradonna installations (which were displayed at the Venice Biennale) clearly influenced in their form and size by Austrian abstract sculptor Franz West. Famously androgynous in her own personal style, Lucas aims to intertangle gender and age stereotypes, arguing that one can “identify with men as much as women,” with her humanoid creations often ambiguous and gender fluid in their appearance. OOPS! and its surrounding group hereby presents us with numerous juxtapositions: femininity versus masculinity, hard and soft, banal and valuable, awkward yet elegant, vulgar and refined.

Born in London in 1962, Sarah Lucas is celebrated as one of the legendary members of the 1990s Young British Artists generation, which also included Tracey Emin, Cornelia Parker and Michael Landy. Born into a working-class family to a milkman father and cleaner mother, her family were reportedly “always making things.” From a young age Lucas was practical and self-sufficient, with her mother teaching her how to sew so that she could make her own clothes, toys and stuffed animals. Leaving school at sixteen, Lucas studied at the Working Men’s College, London College of Printing and Goldsmiths College, graduating from the latter in 1987.  

Lucas was one of a group of artists, which also included Gary Hume, Fiona Rae and Angus Fairhurst, that exhibited at Damien Hirst’s iconic group show, Freeze, in 1988. Emerging onto to the art scene as one of the YBA rising stars, Lucas had her first solo gallery show at City Racing gallery just four years later, memorably titled Penis Nailed to a Board.  Her first solo show in New York followed in 1995 at Barbara Gladstone gallery, who still represents her today. To date Lucas has been the subject of numerous retrospectives internationally, including at Kunsthalle Zurich, Tate Liverpool, Museum Ludwig (Cologne), The New Museum (New York), Museum Boymans-van Beuningen (Rotterdam) and Whitechapel Gallery (London). Lucas was also chosen to exhibit at the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015.

Lucas works primarily with photography, sculpture and installation. The readymade materials she uses, such as furniture, cigarettes, food, and clothing, are often used to invoke bawdy and erotic associations. Often addressing explicit, sexual themes, Lucas’s art is infamous for its vulgarity, absurdity and critical use of stereotypically ‘British’ humour. Initially celebrated for her controversial self-portraits (such as Human Toilet Revisited which showed her smoking on the toilet), since the early 1990s Lucas has used furniture and everyday objects, such as stained mattresses, toilet bowls and stuffed nylon tights, as a substitute for the human body, often with genital punning.