Perhaps the greatest irony of many in this first solo London show of Sarah Lucas is that it is sponsored by Louis Vuitton. ‘Symbolising French elegance and joie de vivre, the Maison LV has always collaborated with the best engineers, decorators and artists,’ it claims. Well, welcome to a new world. Soiled mattresses provocatively pierced by fruit’n’veg, two dessicated hams shoved into a pair of knickers, a mechanical ‘wanking’ machine, a primeval soup of penises — you get the drift. It is of course vintage Lucas, a retrospective of work drawn from two decades of artistic confrontation, and the site she has chosen for this engagement is the human body.
And how cleverly she articulates it. Emerging on to the London art scene in the late 1980s when all the successful artists seemed to be men, Lucas had a bone to pick, and wasted no time in doing so. Gathering together the detritus of life, Duchamp-style, she stitched her component elements into rude, raunchy assemblages ripe with suggestion: not for nothing does the Whitechapel bill the show ‘not recommended for children’.
But the sheer grunge of those early works — the soiled toilet bowl graffitied ‘IS SUICIDE GENETIC?’, the splayed and abject bunny girls fashioned from stuffed tights, the stained mattress hung with two fried eggs and a dried herring (‘Spinster’) — is offset here by the clean lines of a range of modular furniture made from slate-grey breeze blocks, on which her figures loll.
Lucas’s work is always playful, tongue in cheek, from the giant phallic marrow that greets you as you arrive to the cement penises, ‘Eros’ and ‘Priapus’, that bestride the final gallery.
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