Education Lucas was born in London, England in 1962. She left school at 16, returning to study art at The
Working Men's College (1982–83),
London College of Printing (1983–84), and
Goldsmiths College (1984–87), graduating with a degree in Fine Art in 1987.
Work Lucas was included in the 1988 group exhibition
Freeze along with contemporary artists including
Angus Fairhurst,
Damien Hirst, and
Gary Hume. In 1990, Lucas co-organized the
East Country Yard Show with
Henry Bond, in which she also exhibited. Her first two solo exhibitions in 1992 were titled
The Whole Joke and
Penis Nailed to a Board. It was in the early 1990s when Lucas began using furniture as a substitute for the human body, usually with crude genital punning. Created for a show organized by fellow artist
Georg Herold at
Portikus,
Au Naturel (1994) is an
assemblage of objects—a mattress, a bucket, a pair of melons, oranges and a cucumber—that suggest male and female body parts. For six months in 1993, Lucas and fellow artist
Tracey Emin rented a retail space in east London,
The Shop, where they made artworks, ranging from printed mugs to T-shirts with slogans, and put them on sale. In works such as
Bitch (table, T-shirt, melons, and vacuum-packed smoked fish, 1995), she merges tabloid culture with the economy of the ready-made. In earlier work, she had displayed enlarged pages from the
Sunday Sport newspaper. Through her career, Lucas has continued to appropriate
everyday materials (including, for example, freshly made fried eggs) to make works that use humour, visual puns and sexual metaphors of sex, death, Englishness and gender. Sarah Lucas is also known for her 'Artist as Subject' approach where she produced a series of
self-portraits, such as
Human Toilet Revisited, 1998, a colour photograph in which she sits on a toilet smoking a cigarette. In her solo exhibition
The Fag Show at
Sadie Coles in 2000, she used cigarettes as a material, as in
Self-portrait with Cigarettes (2000). And in 2001, Sarah Lucas used Neon tubes for her artwork 'New Religion' in which a transparent coffin has been lit up violet. It was later acquired by
George Michael in 2004. Lucas' 2006 sculpture of a life-size bronze horse and cart,
Perceval, is situated in Compton Verney, Warwickshire. Writing in
The Guardian, in 2011,
Aida Edemariam said that "Lucas was the wildest of the Young British Artists, partying hard and making art that was provocative and at times genuinely shocking". In 1996, she was the subject of a
BBC documentary,
Two Melons and a Stinking Fish.
Exhibitions Lucas had her first solo exhibition in 1992 at
City Racing, an artist-run gallery in south London, and her first solo show in
New York at the
Barbara Gladstone Gallery in 1995. One-person museum exhibitions at
Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen in
Rotterdam, at Portikus in
Frankfurt, at
Museum Ludwig in
Cologne and at
Kunsthalle Zürich, Kunstverein in
Hamburg and
Tate Liverpool have accompanied exhibitions in less conventional spaces—an empty office building for
The Law in 1997, a disused postal depot in
Berlin for the exhibition
Beautiness in 1999, and an
installation at the
Freud Museum called
Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 2000. Lucas's work has been included in major surveys of new British art in the last decade including
Brilliant!—New Art From London at the
Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis, in 1995,
Sensation (Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the
Royal Academy in 1997), and
Intelligence—New British Art, 2000, at
Tate Britain. In 2003, Sarah Lucas participated in the 50th
International Biennale of Art in Venice,
Outlook: Contemporary Art in Athens, and
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, a three-person exhibition for
Tate Britain with Angus Fairhurst and
Damien Hirst in 2004. From October 2005 to January 2006,
Tate Liverpool presented the first survey exhibition of Lucas's work. In 2012, Lucas curated
Free, an exhibition at the
Southbank Centre by the
Koestler Trust. The annual exhibition displays artworks by prisoners, detainees and ex-offenders. The theme was '50', to acknowledge the 50th anniversary of Koestler Trust and Lucas was 50 years old at the time. In 2013, the
Whitechapel Gallery in East
London hosted a retrospective of Lucas' work. Tabish Khan writing for Londonist said about the exhibition: “Though it's the sexually charged art that dominates this exhibition, Lucas is at her most powerful when exercising restraint and subtlety”. In 2015, Sarah Lucas represented Britain at the 56th
Venice Biennale with
I SCREAM DADDIO. She was interviewed by close friend Don Brown during the installation of the exhibition. In September 2018,
The New Museum presented the first American survey of Lucas' work in the exhibition "Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel". Lucas has also created new sculptural works for the exhibition, including ''This Jaguar's Going to Heaven'' (2018), a severed 2003 Jaguar X-Type—the car's back half burned and its front half collaged with cigarettes—and
VOX POP DORIS (2018), a pair of eleven-foot-tall thigh-high platform boots cast in concrete. The exhibition traveled to the
Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in June 2019. The
National Gallery of Australia's 2021-22
Know My Name Exhibition Part Two features the work
Installation of Project 1: Sarah Lucas, as well as her first self-portraits,
Eating a Banana. Numerous works by Lucas featured in the exhibition
Big Women at the
Firstsite gallery in Colchester in the UK in Spring 2023. In September 2023, an exhibition of her work opened at the
Tate Britain. Writing about the Tate Britain exhibition for
Culture Whisper, Tabish Khan,described the show as “It’s a show that’s playful, sexually charged and at times extremely dark". In 2024, the
Kunsthalle Mannheim shows a solo exhibition of her works, curated by
Luisa Heese. In 2025,
Kiasma in Helsinki, Finland ran a solo-exhibition Naked Eye. The exhibition features a large collection of her works from the past four decades including sculptures, photography, and installations. This is her debut exhibition in Nordics. She's interviewed for
Helsingin Sanomat which describes the art as follows: “In Sarah Lucas’s works, crudeness and sensitivity are not mutually exclusive.”
Feminist interpretation Lucas frequently employs a critical humour in her work in order to question conventions and highlight the absurdity of the everyday. One of Lucas' most famous works,
Two Fried Eggs and Kebab, parodies the traditional still life and evokes similarities between itself and feminist
Judy Chicago's infamous piece
The Dinner Party. Feminist reviews often describe Lucas as attempting to add female artists into the canon of art history through her analytical work that predominantly discusses the female body and voyeurism. Lucas frequently appropriates masculine constructions to confront and dissect their nature. While Lucas continues the artistic legacy of feminist artists such as
Hannah Wilke,
Cindy Sherman, and
Rachel Whiteread, her visual language empties femininity of meaning and thus removes her from such a clear 'feminist art' title. Whether it is through recognizable forms or her own mythologized fantasies, her ideas constantly build and transform. She grew up on an estate in Holloway, north London, though she frequently accompanied her parents to other homes to "ogle the furniture."
Young British Artists Young British Artists (YBAs), also known as the Brit artists or the Britart, are a group of British artists who in 1988 began to exhibit together. The group was organized by
Damien Hirst and includes Angus Fairhurst, Michael Landy, Christine Borland, Tracey Emin, Cornelia Parker, and Gary Hume. The group became famous for their openness to materials and processes, shock tactics and entrepreneurial attitude. Their first exhibition
Freeze included the work of Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Angus Fairhurst, and Michael Landy while they were all still students at Goldsmiths College of Art. The term "Young British Artists" was coined in May 1992 by Michael Corris in
Artforum. The acronym YBA wasn't created until 1996 when it was published in
Art Monthly magazine. The terms became the brand for the group and showcased the "can do" spirit their art entailed. == Gallery representation ==