About the Artwork

Sarah Lucas’s recent large-scale sculpture, Sandwich, 2011-2020, stands in opposition to traditional public sculpture. Its horizontal configuration opposes veneration and pomposity through its prosaic absurdity and functional accessibility. Mining at themes of British culture, Lucas ambiguously transposes the humble sandwich on a monumental scale with a metaphoric and literal sense of hyperbole; simultaneously satirising and celebrating the commonplace foodstuff as a proletariat symbol. The material austerity of the work in concrete, elevates and inverts the object’s ordinariness with irreverent humour.

Year: 2011-2020


© Sarah Lucas, Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: © Nick Turpin

Material

Concrete

Dimensions

60 x 244 x 190 cm

Artist Biography

Sarah Lucas

Sarah Lucas has over the course of the last three decades become recognised as one of Britain’s most significant contemporary artists. Spanning sculpture, photography and installation, her work has consistently been characterised by irreverent humour and the use of everyday ‘readymade' objects – furniture, food, tabloid newspapers, tights, toilets, cigarettes – to conjure up corporeal fragments. The body, in its many guises, is Lucas’s prevailing subject. In the 1990s she placed herself at the heart of her work in a series of photographic self-portraits. These images’ disarming mixture of vulnerability and attitudinising set the double-edged tone of much of the artist’s subsequent work. Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, London) studied at the Working Men’s College (1982–3), London College of Printing (1983–4), and Goldsmiths College (1984–7). She has exhibited internationally since coming to prominence in the 1990s with solo shows Penis Nailed to a Board, City Racing, London (1992) and The Whole Joke, Kingly Street, London (1992), followed by a presentation in 1993 at MoMA, New York. In 2005 a touring retrospective took place at Kunsthalle Zürich, Kunstverein Hamburg and Tate Liverpool. Major solo exhibitions in the last decade have included Project 1: Sarah Lucas, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2021); Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2019); the acclaimed mid-career retrospective Au Naturel, New Museum (2018, touring to Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2019); Sarah Lucas: Good Muse, Legion of Honor, San Francisco (2017); POWER IN WOMAN, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (2016, travelling to Humber Street Gallery, Hull in 2017); I SCREAM DADDIO, British Pavilion, 56th Venice International Art Biennale, Venice (2015); Tramway, Glasgow (2014); NOB + Gelatin, Secession, Vienna (2013); and SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2013). She lives and works in Suffolk.