Project 1: Sarah Lucas

Project 1: Sarah Lucas brings together recent bodies of work by one of England’s most influential and unapologetic artists.

Over the past 30 years, she has transformed everyday materials, such as vegetables, cigarettes and stockings through sculpture, photography and performance. The human body recurs in her practice as a site of potential desire and failure, exploring the ways in which gender and sexuality are performed.

Lucas is known for her use of crude and humorous imagery, and this exhibition explores the representation and experience of gender and confronts the realities of bodily existence. The exhibition features two recent sculpture series, including new works from the Bunny series she has been making since 1997. A new series of bronze sculptures depicts similar figures that incorporate both masculine and feminine elements, challenging gender stereotypes and humorously playing with conventions of representation.

Lucas’s sculptural work is exhibited alongside rarely seen images of the artist’s first self-portrait, Eating a Banana (1990), which will be reproduced to more than seven metres high – covering the exhibition walls from floor to ceiling.

Curator: Peter Johnson, Curator, Projects