Sarah Lucas’ new sculptures have us on the edge of our seats
The British artist discusses her latest series of seductive sitters which sit on, hug, and suffocate different chair designs
‘I just choose chairs that appeal to me, and it’s quite a random thing really as there’s no predicting what will come along,’ Sarah Lucas tells Wallpaper*. She’s discussing the chairs she lets her amorphous sitters with elongated limbs and globular breasts occupy in her concurrent exhibitions, which opened New York’s Gladstone Gallery and Sadie Coles HQ in London.
The chairs submit to Lucas’s bronze or wool-stuffed pantyhose seducers, who clinch, caress, and conquer the benches’ erected spines and inviting laps. In fact, it is the chairs’ bygone human traits that render their helplessness towards the persistent critters — newest sculptures from her ongoing Bunnies series — puzzlingly enticing and vigorous. Also note the allure of high heels (she has a shoe collection on hand) the artist put onto her dashing posers. Accents of power and posture, their sharp heels contrast with the bodies’ soft textures, a cautionary tale for assumers of ease and malleability beneath twisted and knotted humanoids that, according to Lucas, ‘somehow have found their way onto the chairs.’
An original member of the Young British Artists clan, Lucas started making unabashedly laid-back figures with stuffed and contorted pantyhose soon after her rise to fame in the early 1990s. Then, their relationship to chairs remained more utilitarian and timid, a riff on the sitter role art history had granted to ‘proper’ female subjects. Nuds, which put more abstracted and freestyle knotted forms onto pedestals, emerged in the late 2000s, and constituted an important part of Lucas’s first American survey, Au Naturel, at New Museum in New York last year.
‘A fundamental dimension of sculpture,’ she explains, ‘is how things join together and support themselves in position’ in simultaneous shows on both sides of the pond. Serpentine figures pull references from Nuds’s carefree assembly of the body: limbs stretch to extremity, hinting phallic erection or architectural epitome; breasts (‘Having tits doesn’t always make you a woman,’ Lucas underlines) blossom from one another, multiplying into a bouquet of buds or bumpy highlands.
Corporate Modernist sleekness of the New York show’s chairs have ‘a certain masculinity,’ Lucas admits. They seem to emerge from a manager’s carpeted room in a Midtown office or an ill-lit waiting room of a dentist, captured by stilettoed ‘honeys,’ sneaking through their hollows and clasping onto their stiff skins. ‘The chair does come first,’ she answers about her order of building a give-and-take, in which numbing malleability of the body comforts and defies the stillness of a seat.
INFORMATION
Sarah Lucas ‘Honey Pie’ opened at Sadie Coles HQ, London, which is temporarily closed to the public and Gladstone Gallery, New York, open by appointment only. A video walkthrough of the London exhibition is available here. sadiecoles.com; gladstonegallery.com
Wallpaper* Newsletter
Receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories from around the world direct to your inbox.
Osman Can Yerebakan is a New York-based art and culture writer. Besides Wallpaper*, his writing has appeared in the Financial Times, GQ UK, The Guardian, Artforum, BOMB, Airmail and numerous other publications. He is in the curatorial committee of the upcoming edition of Future Fair. He was the art and style editor of Forbes 30 Under 30, 2024.
-
Maude’s Brâncuși-inspired sex toys go on display in a new Paris exhibition
Maude’s design-led vibrators are now on display at Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, as part of ‘Private Lives: From the Bedroom to Social Media’. Brand founder Éva Goicochea talks to Wallpaper* about partnering with the museum and opening up cultural conversations around sex
By India Birgitta Jarvis Published
-
‘I was captivated by the idea of merging two iconic brands’: Nigo on his 1990s-inspired collaboration with Moncler and Mercedes-Benz
Unveiled at Moncler’s ‘The City of Genius’ event in Shanghai this past weekend, Japanese fashion designer Nigo unpacks his three-way collaboration with Moncler and Mercedes-Benz, which includes a play on the G-Class alongside a fashion collection in his eclectic style
By Jack Moss Published
-
Cathay Pacific’s new business class Aria Suites take flight
Cathay Pacific raises the bar for business-class travel with the launch of the much-anticipated Aria Suites
By Lauren Ho Published
-
Frieze Sculpture takes over Regent’s Park
Twenty-two international artists turn the English gardens into a dream-like landscape and remind us of our inextricable connection to the natural world
By Smilian Cibic Published
-
Brutalism in film: the beautiful house that forms the backdrop to The Room Next Door
The Room Next Door's production designer discusses mood-boarding and scene-setting for a moving film about friendship, fragility and the final curtain
By Anne Soward Published
-
'There’s an anxiety under all of it': Violet Dennison in New York
Violet Dennison debuts abstract paintings with new show 'Damaged Self' at Tara Downs Gallery
By Mary Cleary Published
-
‘Gas Tank City’, a new monograph by Andrew Holmes, is a photorealist eye on the American West
‘Gas Tank City’ chronicles the artist’s journey across truck-stop America, creating meticulous drawings of fleeting moments
By Jonathan Bell Published
-
Mark Armijo McKnight’s bodily landscapes capture the tactile serenity of the American West
The artist’s new exhibition at the Whitney Museum, which is organised by the museum curator Drew Sawyer, offers a succinct window into his contemplative suggestion of queering a landscape
By Osman Can Yerebakan Published
-
Dark, glamorous and hedonistic: a photography book captures New York in the 1990s
New York: High Life, Low Life, by Dafydd Jones, goes behind the scenes of New York society
By Hannah Silver Published
-
Derrick Alexis Coard’s portraits are a sensitive, positive testimony to Black men
The late artist Derrick Alexis Coard’s retrospective ‘I Am That I Am’, at New York’s Salon 94, honours his ‘symbolic expression for possible change for the African-American male community’
By Tianna Williams Published
-
Intimacy, violence and the uncanny: Joanna Piotrowska in Philadelphia
Artist and photographer Joanna Piotrowska stages surreal scenes at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania
By Hannah Silver Published