Sarah Lucas
Valdemars Slot is delighted to present Sarah Lucas’ first solo project in Denmark. The iconic Tea Pavilion is animated by Lucas’ distinctive visual language, with a group of sculptures that subvert its formal language with barbed feminist wit.
Questions of female identity have remained fundamental to Sarah Lucas’ practice since she first came to prominence in the late 1980s. Her anthropomorphic sculptures transform the elegant Tea Pavilion into a bordello, laced with art historical pastiche. Calling on traditions of the female nude, Lucas points to all that is laughable and demeaning about women’s objectification. The figures slouch, pose and crawl over chairs, exposing breasts moulded on party balloons, glossy red bottoms and long limbs in towering PVC heels. GOOD THOUGHTS – BAD THOUGHTS prepares to fight back; wielding a pair of boxing gloves, she sits atop a bin-cum-pedestal like an umpire.
Clamped to a spindly chair, TARUNA embodies Lucas’ long-standing use of pantyhose as an artistic medium. Associated with sex and femininity, the material first appeared in her work as early as 1993. The stuffed tights recall marbled fat and blood vessels, whilst hems and seams form nipples and labia. Combined with the heavy materials, like concrete or bronze, and rough everyday objects that make up this installation, the nylon evokes vulnerability. TARUNA cackles at polite conventions, while showing her fleshy underbelly.
“"There are these codes about what it means to be masculine and what it means to be feminine which we don't interrogate enough... I'm curious and I suppose I just play with that".
— Sarah Lucas
Artist Bio
Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, London)
Lucas lives and works in London, where she became known as part of the Young British Artists generation in the late 1980s. Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour, incorporating photography, sculpture, collage and found objectsRecent solo presentations include those at Kiasma, Helsinki (2025); Kunsthalle Mannheim (2024); Tate Britain, London (2023); National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2021); Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2019); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019). Her work is held in collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Museum of Modern Art in New York; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk.