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Sarah LucasLuminary

Sculptor / Contemporary Artist

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Sarah Lucas

Sarah Lucas is an artist, sculptor and part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged during the 1990s. 

It was a bloody amazing time and we were all absolutely high on it. It’s only now that you can begin to get any distance and look at the sort of revolution it caused in London, in the art scene anyway. All these other things that have come along with that time, like Tate Modern, it was like this big powerful explosion. I think it was possible because there were so many of us. It started off with just a whole bunch of kids making art and going to each others’ shows and trying to put on bigger and bigger shows. We were also our own audience and it kept the whole thing really buoyant. It’s only after a couple of decades go by that you look back and think: wow! And how much that changed everything.

Lucas studied art at The Working Men's College (1982–83), London College of Printing (1983–84) and Goldsmith's College (1984–87 graduating with a degree in Fine Art.

I like the idea of not having a style and just keeping things together with ideas and an attitude. 

Throughout her career, she has continued to appropriate everyday materials (including, for example, freshly made fried eggs) to create works that use humour, visual puns and sexual metaphors often featuring sex, death, Englishness and gender.

I don’t know if I have ever set out to parody Britishness, it’s just something you can’t really take out of me, I suppose. I am quite typical in some ways, although I’m probably not that typical of British women; I’m more typical of British blokes.

She had her first solo exhibition in 1992 at City Racing, an artists' run gallery in south London, and her first solo show in New York at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in 1995.

I don’t think I make things for a specific type of public. I like to be as broad as possible. I’m not anti-intellectual or anything; I just think things can operate on different levels. I want to make works that anybody can relate to, not only the people from the art world, but also the ordinary man or woman on the street, from the particular class I came from.

In 2015 she represented Britain at the 56th Venice Biennale with Scream Daddio.

A lot of art requires input from others, whether you label them assistants or friends. People don’t like to hear that, particularly now, when we are living in a super egocentric time. Instead, my self-portraits are very much about relationships, about being with someone else, and being looked at by or playing with someone else. They are me, but being me is always about being with others. Art takes a lot of people. A life takes a lot of people.

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