Situation, a new gallery at 4 New Burlington Place, will open in Febuary with an exhibition devoted to the work of Sarah Lucas. The gallery will present new installations in February, May, August and November 2012, alongside an organic programme of events directed by the artist. The extended displays will include works both new and historical, mainly by Sarah Lucas and occasionally involving other artists.
The opening exhibition will include a new sculpture by Lucas incorporating her signature use of everyday materials such as concrete, underwear, and found domestic objects. Through a combination of sturdy and fragile elements, and of grounded and suspended forms, the work overlays an emblematic representation the body with reference to ancient myth.
Situation channels the spirit of the artist-led exhibitions of the late 1980s and 1990s with which Lucas and her contemporaries launched their careers. Sarah Lucas has long made new work in specific, sometimes remote and unusual locations, places which have engaged her interest and sparked a development in her sculpture. Situation will bring some of this work home, and then mix it up with older, rarely-seen sculpture or work by artists with whom she has a strong affinity.
To coincide with the new gallery, Sadie Coles HQ will publish a book documenting Lucas’s work from 2005 (the end-date of her existing catalogue raisonné) to the present, titled After 2005, Before 2012. Sadie Coles HQ continues to operate a programme in the galleries at 69 South Audley Street and 4 New Burlington Place, as well as periodic off-site projects presenting artists’ work in a variety of locations throughout London. Sarah Lucas is working on a project in Mexico City with Kurimanzutto for April 2012 and Ordinary Things, a solo survey exhibition, will open at Henry Moore Institute in July.
Sarah Lucas was born in London in 1962. She studied art at The Working Men’s College, London College of Printing and Goldsmith’s College, completing her degree 1987.
She came to prominence in the group exhibition Freeze, with contemporaries, Damien Hirst, and Gary Hume, emerging as one of the most important young British Artists during the 1990s. Her body of work is highly provocative and In the early 1990s she began using furniture as a substitute for the human body. She merges tabloid culture with the economy of the ready-made.
Her first two solo exhibitions in 1992 were titled The Whole Joke and Penis Nailed to a Board.
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.
Throughout her career, Lucas has continued to appropriate everyday materials to make works that use humour, visual puns and sexual metaphor to discuss sex, death, Englishness and gender.
Exhibitions include Temple of Bacchus (with Colin Lowe and Roddy Thompson) at Milton Keynes Gallery, in 2003; Charlie George, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, in 2002; and The Pleasure Principle at the Freud Museum, London, in 2000.
Lucas also exhibited in the fiftieth Venice Biennale in 2003.