Sarah Lucas

Kevin and Florian, 2013

Sarah Lucas’s Florian and Kevin are large-scale sculptures depicting giant marrows, cast in both bronze and concrete. The marrow has appeared multiple times in Lucas’s art, functioning as a symbol of growth, fecundity, and the English pastoral tradition (evoking Harvest Festival displays and country fair competitions). She has remarked upon the “tradition in England, mostly among men, of growing super large vegetables and showing them off at harvest time. A prize for the biggest.”

The bronze versions – highly polished to resemble silver – have been displayed in exhibitions including Lucas’s 2013–14 solo presentation at Secession, Vienna, and in a sculpture display at Chatsworth House in 2015. In 2013, the concrete versions were on public display in City Hall Park, New York, where Florian snaked in a languid curve on the grass, and Kevin – stouter and sturdier in appearance – sat amid shrubbery.

Sleek and supine, the bronze versions are among the most recent in a long line of bronze casts by the artist. With their imposing scale and gleaming finish, the snaking vegetables appear simultaneously majestic and comic, austere and subtly absurd. In their stature and smooth contours, they recall the scaled-up casts of Henry Moore, and are similarly suggestive of a host of organic, natural forms.

Lucas’s recent work has often been linked with that of British Modernist sculptors such as Moore and Barbara Hepworth – above all her NUDS series, begun in 2009, in which stuffed tights are wrought into knotted, fleshy masses that uncannily resemble carved stone. In the words of Guardian critic Jonathan Jones: “Moore and Hepworth share similar concerns to Lucas. They imagine the human body transfigured into abstract form. Lucas, too, transforms the body, but in ways that always point back, with harsh humour, towards the unvarnished facts of life.”

Florian

2013

bronze

135 x 495 x 250cm / 53 ⅛ x 194 ⅜ x 98⅜ in

Kevin

2013

bronze

150 x 460 x 135 cm / 59 x 181 x 53 ⅛ in