Sarah Lucas
Valdemars Slots Arts Foundation presents Sarah Lucas’ first solo exhibition in Denmark. A group of five sculptures introduce the British artist’s bold, tender exploration of gender and sexuality.
Situated in the iconic Tea Pavilion, her figures transform a space designed for polite ritual into a fantastical world of fun, darkness, and vulnerability, beyond the constraints of social convention.
Questions of female identity have remained fundamental to Sarah Lucas’ practice since she first came to prominence as part of the Young British Artists (YBAs) in the late 1980s. Her works frequently deploy ‘readymade’ materials, such as furniture and food, cigarettes and pantyhose, to evoke the human body. Calling on traditions of the female nude, Lucas parodies art historical precedent whilst exposing the casual misogyny ingrained in the everyday. GOOD THOUGHTS – BAD THOUGHTS prepares to fight back; wielding a pair of boxing gloves, she sits atop a bin-cum-pedestal like an umpire.
These works are united by the use of familiar domestic or office chairs, whose clean, often modernist lines contrast with the messy, irreverent female-coded figures. Slouched, posed, or splayed on these ‘functional’ objects, they expose breasts moulded on party balloons or recalling Playboy bunny ears, pop glossy red bottoms and stretch out their legs in towering PVC heels. Taking male ideals to a pornographic extreme, Lucas reveals what is at once laughable and demeaning about women’s objectification.
The way these sculptures push and pull between coherent figuration and abstract assemblage is key to their punning critique. Notions of value embedded in her materials are transferred to the female body – SLAG combines an offensive street term with reference to the heavy, raw concrete, associated with waste products, from which the subject’s naked form is constructed - set against the art historical weight, and literal price of her shiny bronze heels.
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 and rough everyday objects that make up this installation, the nylon evokes both bodily and emotional 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.