Sarah Lucas artworks in contrast with the sculptures of Auguste Rodin. The provocative masculinity of her artistic style.

ArtWizard, 27.05.2019

Sarah Lucas becomes famous with her collages from copies and parts of newspapers. She combines pictures of girls from tabloids with some grotesque titles seeking for sensational news. Some of those collages the artist includes in her auto portraits, which brings a specific flavor to them. She photographs herself in a typical masculine pose – sitting on a staircase with wide spread legs, wearing black leather jacket, dark sunglasses and rough shoes or eating a banana with a provocative face. In her artworks, objects of everyday life such as food objects for example are ranged in nature-morte compositions and very often they carry a sexual subtext. Sarah Lucas if very often implying some critical humor in her works in order to provoke questions about the absurdity of the everyday life.

She is considered a feminist artist, although feminist reviews often describe her as attempting to add female artists into the art history frame through her works describe different parts of the female body in a provocative way and imply voyeurism. Sexuality is not apparent in her works, but the lack of morality leaves the viewers at their free will of her humorous messages, taking the role of a feminist reflecting on sexism, but not over commenting on it. She says that she is not trying to solve the problem, but rather incorporating it and thus trying to solve the moral dilemma.

The works of Sarah Lucas are both conceptual and searching for a meaning and she is never satisfied, constantly searching for new sources of inspiration and for every possible medium and material for an outlet that is fitting her concepts. To her, the artworks “carry on talking and thinking with other people”.

She is famous with one of her works Two Fried Eggs and Kebab, where she evokes some similarities with another feminist artist - Judy Chicago and her work The Dinner Party. In her famous work, Sarah Lucas parodies the traditional still life and the way classical art depicts the objects of everyday life. That makes her as one of the modern British artists from the generation of the Young British Artists emerged in the nineties. She is recognized as among the most prominent members of the Young British Artists alongside Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Tracey Emin.

In another show, she parodies the traditional way August Rodin depicts the various compositions involving the human body, with her sculptures made of tights and plaster, using cigarettes placed in some sexual parts of the body. Her works frequently have a subtext of bawdy humor and include visual pins, collage, found objects and photography. In the latter show from 2017 at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco, she shows as a highlight her work My Disease, featuring a mattress riddled with cotton bulbs in woman tights that resemble woman breasts, slumped over a pie on an upturned and stripped box spring, and pierced through with fluorescent lights that reminds of an image of San Sebastian from the Renaissance age. In this show, the famous sculpture of Auguste Rodin, the Age of Bronze, being an idealized classic, stands as an opposite to the surreal monumentality of the work of Sarah Lucas, My Disease, which totally deconstructs the notion of an idealized classic depiction of the human body.