'Mixing the vernacular and the vulgar, the dirty and the delicate, Lucas’s art is as sorrowful and touching as it is funny', writes Adrian Searle
© Sarah Lucas/Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ
Though Lucas often portrays genitalia with a kind of carnivalesque ribaldry, she also touches on the tragic lumpenness of the body, and sexual aspiration bought low by the reality of the human animal
© Sarah Lucas/Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ
Her gigantic, Pythonesque version of a block of Spam (rear) has all the sculptural presence of a Richard Serra block of steel, redone in alarming parody
© Sarah Lucas/Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ
The continuity of her work with the sculpture of the past is to do with her direct manipulation of form, and to sculpture’s constant preoccupation with bodies in space
© Sarah Lucas
The very ordinariness and lowliness of the things Lucas uses to make her work, and the point their usage makes, stops you in your tracks
© Sarah Lucas/Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ
© Sarah Lucas/Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ
What keeps you looking is her sculpture’s formal sublety, her terrific sense of touch, her ability to transform the lowly and the commonplace through unexpected conjunctions and manipulations
© Sarah Lucas/Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ
Her kapok-stuffed Nuds may be sausage-like or intestinal, but their folding-in on themselves or compact writhings can be taken as a kind of self-protection
© Sarah Lucas/Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ
They look exposed, as naked in the light as disembowelments, and as choreographed and expressive as a solo dance
© Sarah Lucas/Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ
Lucas is also showing new work at the Sarah Lucas Situation at Sadie Coles gallery. She will also be curating the 50th Arthur Koestler Trust exhibition of art by prison inmates (to be shown at the Royal Festival Hall in September) and will have a major retrospective at the Whitechapel gallery, London, in 2013
© Sarah Lucas/Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ
