Sarah Lucas will present a much-anticipated solo exhibition in the British Pavilion in Venice next year, a press release states.
Installation View, Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace), 55th International Art Exhibition, Venice
01 June – 24 November 2014,
copyright the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London
Sarah Lucas is considered one of the Young British Artists (yBa) who were emerging in London in the 1990s following the exhibition Freeze (1988), which was organized by Damian Hirst, East Country Yard Show (1990), organized by Lucas and Henry Bond, and Modern Medicine (1990), organized by Hirst, Billee Sellman and Carl Freedman. These three artist-initiated exhibitions held in empty factories and indutrial areas, launched a new generation of British artists where the most prominent are Hirst, Lucas and Tracy Emin.
In the press release from Britich Counsil, the choice of Lucas is explained as following ´her major retrospective, SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble at Whitechapel (2013), and surveys of her work at Secession in Vienna (2013-14) and at Tramway in Glasgow (2014).´
The press release goes on to state that:
´Over the course of two decades, Lucas has become recognised as one of Britain’s most significant contemporary artists. Spanning sculpture, photography and installation, her work has consistently been characterised by irreverent humour and the use of everyday ‘readymade’ objects – furniture, food, tabloid newspapers, tights, toilets, cigarettes – to conjure up sexual puns and corporeal fragments. By turns brutal and elegiac, lewd and lyrical, Lucas’s art has continued to confront such ‘big themes’ as sex, death and abjection.´
Installation View, SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble
Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2 October – 15 December 2013,
copyright the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London
Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, London) studied at the Working Men’s College (1982–3), London College of Printing (1983–4), and Goldsmith’s College (1984–7). The seminal group show Freeze (1988) was followed by solo shows Penis Nailed to a Board, City Racing, London, and The Whole Joke, Kingly Street, London (both 1992). In 1993 she collaborated with Tracey Emin on The Shop, Bethnal Green Road. She has since exhibited internationally–major exhibitions include MoMA New York (1993); Museum Boymans-van Beunigen, Rotterdam (1996); Portikus, Frankfurt (1996); the Freud Museum, London (2000); Tecla Sala, Barcelona (2000); and In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (with Angus Fairhurst and Damien Hirst) at Tate Britain (2004). A retrospective took place in 2005 at Kunsthalle Zürich, Kunstverein Hamburg and Tate Liverpool.
Recent international residencies and exhibitions include LUCAS BOSCH GELATIN, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria and NUZ: Spirit of Ewe, Two Rooms, Auckland, New Zealand (both 2011); Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli, Mexico City (2012; recently chronicled in the encyclopaedic book
TITTIPUISSIDAD with photography by Julian Simmons); and Ordinary Things, a major exhibition of her sculpture, at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2012). From 2012-13, SITUATION – a space dedicated to her work at Sadie Coles HQ – hosted eight shows. 2012 saw the publication of After 2005–Before 2012, a publication on her work covering seven prolific years.
Sarah Lucas is represented by Sadie Coles HQ, London; Gladstone Gallery, New York; Kurimanzutto, Mexico City and CFA, Berlin.