Autobiographical attitude and interest in the representation of the body, mainly through an immediate reference to the sexual organs constitute the underlying themes of Lucas’s work. Her crude reduction of the male body to merely its sexual organs is achieved through a raw vision that doesn’t indulge in any sort of eroticism. Gigantic phallic sculptures stand as direct representations while in other works various edible items stand as symbolic representations.

 

In the second gallery an entire room painted in blood red is wallpapered in blow-ups of a naked male torso. The explicit play of nudity and the interaction of objects – a beer can, a slice of red meat, a cucumber, oranges and onions, a milk bottle…- blur the borders of the single image and recall on purpose, in its overall effect, Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion.

 

Headless bodies always and everywhere; the only face is the one of the artist. A defiant look, a cigarette between her lips as in Fighting Fire with Five Channel 4 Poster, 1999, a billboard poster in four panels, or eating a banana to oppose sexism as in Great Dates, 1991/2013, a large wallpaper reproducing pages of popular British tabloids, staged here with Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996, a portrait of the artist with two fried eggs on her breasts, and Sex Baby Bed Base, 2000, metal bed base, chicken, T-shirt, lemons, coat hanger, or a pensive, intense gaze as in Self-Portrait with Skull, 1996, a portrait of the artist with a skull between her feet, installed on top of a stair like an altarpiece, a vanitas of our times.

 

In many works Sarah Lucas uses objects of everyday use found in the street: stained mattresses, old wooden tables, discarded toilets, coat hangers, metal bed bases, leather sofas…Here the action of the artist rescues the objet trouve’ and brings it to a new level.

 

Sarah Lucas summarizes femininity and stylizes the female body in a crude way: works like Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, 1992, items laid on an old wooden table, Spinster, 2000, a stained mattress, a hanger with two fried eggs, a sliced herring or Au Naturel, 1994, two melons and a rusty water bucket on a mattress counteract the stereotyped image of women.

 

Nylon tights filled with kapok, allusive to headless female bodies and to limbs slouching on wooden chairs populate a group of seminal works that shift Lucas’s attention and style towards a more complex vision of the body as in Bunny Gets Snookered #1, 1997.

 

This change of technique is a step towards a greater change. As the curator Iwona Blazwick writes in the catalogue: “What we encounter is a change of register. Lucas’ early works assemble found objects such as clothing, furniture and food; her later sculptures use the techniques of casting and construction to take one step into abstraction”.

 

In 2009 Sarah Lucas starts NUDS, a series of new works, sculptures where stuffed tights on plinths of concrete breeze blocks assume polymorphic shapes.

 

Recently, casted in bronze, NUDS have gone beyond representation to become pure, polished, shining forms.

 

Suggestions of, allusions to limbs of female and male bodies embrace entwined, entangled, breasts and genitalia melt one into the other in the eternal fight between Eros and Thanatos.

 

The third gallery at Whitechapel, which opens with Self-Portrait, 2000, outlined in cigarettes on brown paper, shows in all their sculpted, elegant morphism, the cast bronzes NUDS 2013 like Nduda, Realidad, Hoolian, Nahuiollin.

 

The Giardino Scarpa in the Padiglione Centrale of the Venice Biennale 2013, entirely installed with and dedicated to a group of these bronzes, revealed in its stillness a new dimension and a new intention in Sarah Lucas’ work, the same that we feel here now in this other space.

 

This retrospective and the recent works find a echo in what she writes in the catalogue:”

“…I wanted art to be a consequence of my life rather than a job or profession “.

 

Sarah Lucas: SITUATION. Absolute Beach Man Rubble, Whitechapel Gallery, London, until December 15, 2013