Sarah Lucas

Lucas made her first Bunny in 1997, initiating an iconic series of female figures entwined with anthropomorphic chairs. While the earliest iterations were constructed from stuffed tights stretched over a wire armature, the artist has more recently expanded the series through bronze and resin casts. A lithe and slippery female form, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, 2023 marks a new direction, with a striking palette of reds and maroons on shiny painted bronze. The title is derived from a song by The Beatles, whose music often accompanies Lucas in the studio.

Cast from soft prototypes, BUNNY RABBIT, 2022 and SLAG, 2022 comprise polished bronze anatomies of extruded, tubular forms. TARUNA, 2021 and GOOD THOUGHTS - BAD THOUGHTS, 2023, both recent examples of the soft Bunny sculptures, extend the series with exaggerated anatomical contortions, flamboyant footwear and chairs of eclectic scale and design. Bright colours, multiplied breasts and boxing gloves evoke the theatrics of a surrealist catfight, at once comedic and unsettling. Lucas elevates both works, one atop a bright industrial bin, recalibrating the balance of power between sculpture and viewer.

Self-Portrait with Knickers, 1994 belongs to a body of photographic works that Lucas produced during the 1990s and early 2000s. Photographed in her North London garden, the artist adopts a swaggering defiance redolent of male posturing, which both reinforces and destabilises the domestic associations of the washing line. As in the Bunny sculptures, Lucas uses the female body to question binary understandings of gender within society.