Sarah Lucas

Sandwich, 2011-2020

Sandwich is a new version of a work originally made in 2004 (subsequently destroyed), depicting two giant slices of bread – one laid crookedly on top of the other – in cast concrete. The slabs are separated by an irregular crack indicating a thick seam of sandwich filling.

The sculpture is one of numerous works in which Lucas refers to mundane foodstuffs (Spam, kebabs, fried eggs) in all their banality, absurdity, and subliminal eroticism. It serves moreover as a floor-based counterpart to the various suspended sculptures (e.g. Spam Zeppelin, 2004) in which she has transformed items of food into symbolic, surreal, or monumental forms.

In its heft and horizontality, Sandwich resembles a Minimalist sculpture, yet its quotidian subject undercuts this allusion – constituting a subversive take on the genre of still life. Poised between crude literalism and metaphoric possibility, the work is an enlarged (even hyperbolic) readymade, with the tilting crust of uncut bread capturing the roughshod spirit of much of the artist’s work and debunking the usual pomp of public sculpture.

As the writer Angus Cook has observed in relation to another sculpture (Au Naturel, 1994, whose slumped mattress is echoed in the lopsided slice of Sandwich): “The ordinary things, from which it is made, celebrate the indivisibility of working-class and feminist values. ‘When something’s good enough, it’s perfect.’”

In another version of the sculpture, also dating from 2004, Lucas cast the sandwich from jesmonite, with a painted surface that faithfully replicated the bleached-white faces and baked crusts of the bread. Here, the object is rendered in raw concrete – resulting in a more abstract and brutalist spectacle that echoes the other concrete casts Lucas made in the 2000s (e.g. Courgette, Pie, and Marrow – all 2002).

The original Sandwich was shown at Snape Maltings, Suffolk, as part of the 57th Aldeburgh Festival, close to works by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth – a placement that highlighted both Lucas’s formalist affinities with, and comic subversion of, the category of modernist British sculpture.

concrete

63 x 243 x 190 cm / 24 ¾ x 95 ⅝ x 74 ¾ in