- Sarah LucasBy Matthew Collings
- Sarah Lucas: I Scream DaddioBy Sarah Lucas, D.H. Lawrence and Julian Simmons
- Sarah Lucas: Au NaturelBy Amn Malik
- Sarah Lucas: Ordinary ThingsBy Sara Lucas, Lisa Le Feuvre, Deborah Orr, Anne Wagner, Gilda Williams
Important Art by Sarah Lucas
Eating a Banana (1990)
In Eating a Banana (1990) an androgynous looking Lucas is shown in a close shot, eating a banana and looking askance at the camera. The setting of the image appears to be a yard of some kind, lending the image an urban feel. Lucas's attire and confident gaze subvert the sexual connotations (the act of fellatio) of her actions in the image. This was one of a number of photographic self-portraits Lucas produced throughout the 1990s which portray the artist adopting different poses. She is shown, for instance, sitting in an armchair with her legs apart, two fried eggs placed over her breasts; sitting on a toilet; and standing in front of a makeshift washing line of underwear in what seems to be a forest or garden.
By "performing" Eating a Banana, Lucas counterposes the suggestive nature of her actions with the actuality of her defiant gaze and masculine clothing. This self-portrait invites comparisons to Lynda Benglis's infamous Centrefold (1974), in which she posed naked with a large dildo. However, while Benglis still reproduced the expectations of a naked woman in her early image, disrupting it albeit with a phallus, Lucas effectively replaces the phallus, gazing defiantly while fully clothed. Reflecting of her early self-portraits, Lucas said "I suddenly could see the strength of the masculinity about [them] the usefulness of [masculinity] to the subject struck me at that point, and since then I've used that".
Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992)
Functioning as a critique on sexist attitudes, this sculpture features two fried eggs and a kebab placed on a wooden table below a photograph of the same arrangement as if in a photo frame. The eggs, freshly cooked each day, are located alongside each other, and the kebab, with its open pitta bread encasing kebab folds, is placed below. These food items depict the breasts and vagina by representing the well-known pun on words. Equally, the image becomes a reclining female nude, reducing the woman to what might be seen as her "essential" parts.
When Art Historian Anne M. Wagner says that Lucas' main task is "the mining of the semantic possibilities of everyday things", and when Lucas herself says that "everything is language, including objects", and declares, "composition is my work", she is describing her approach to sculpture as an arrangement. Speaking of this work, author Michelle Robecchi admired a "simplicity and formal directness, combined with a subtly perverse humour [that] evoke fetishism and mental associations with an ingenious insight, disquieting even the most innocent viewer". One must acknowledge the humor and act of play in the work, which is so fundamental to Lucas's worldview, and so central to the creative urge itself. Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab demonstrates Lucas's urge to play with the metaphors of street language.
Au Naturel (1994)
Predating Tracy Emin's more famous (and more personal) My Bed by some three years, Au Naturel (the title of the work is the brand name printed on the mattress label) is a sculpture in which a yellowing, stained mattress sits slumped against a gallery wall. On the upper left hand side two melons have been inserted into cuts made in the mattress. They are placed above a water bucket, that opens outwards towards the viewer. On the right, two oranges and a courgette protrude from the mattress. The symbolism is, like Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, crude and unambiguous. Presented at the controversial Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997, however, Au Naturel brought Lucas's fascination with crude sexual metaphors to a whole new global audience, and thereby confirmed her ability to confront (and quite likely offend) her audience through a flagrant play on base connotative associations.
Gilda Williams has described Au Naturel as "a portrait of a naked and amorous couple" (the penis is erect and the vagina is open) that amounts to "a vulgar composition of materials and vernacular language". The "couple" lay apart, very possibly in a state of pre or post-coitus. Academic Amna Malik, meanwhile, picked up on the work's blunt objectivity; there is, she says, "no apparent morality attached - no implication of guilt, shame, or embarrassment". There was, however, a bigger point to be made about Lucas's position within the contemporary art scene at the end of the twentieth century. For Malik the "sardonic and irreverent" nature of this work (and others) presented an afront to "assumptions about what kind of art women artists make". Indeed, Malik contests that Lucas's "shift between high and low art and culture operates as a shift between 'high' aesthetic ideas about the art object as a metaphoric play of meaning and its 'low' associations with the materiality of the literal object and its allusions to the genitals and sex".
Influences and Connections

- Damien Hirst
- Gary Hume
- Jake and Dinos Chapman
- Sam Taylor-Wood
- Marc Quinn
- Tracey Emin
- David Bowie
- Sterling Ruby
- Res
- Damien Hirst
- Angus Fairhurst
- Franz West
- Oliver Garbay
- Andrea Dworkin
- Contemporary Feminist Art
- Contemporary Sculpture