The British Council is delighted to present I SCREAM DADDIO, a new exhibition by Sarah Lucas, conceived and created for the British Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
Commenting on the exhibition, her first as Commissioner of the British Pavilion, Emma Dexter, Director of Visual Arts at the British Council, said:
“Sarah is one of our foremost artists and it is entirely appropriate that she should be representing the UK in Venice, the grandest of stages. Sarah has risen to the occasion. Her provocative new pieces interrogate our assumptions about gender and domesticity, drawing on her previous work but on an unprecedented scale. I am confident that the British Pavilion this year will inspire, confound and move audiences both in Venice and around the world.”
Sarah Lucas’s solo presentation for the British Pavilion centres on an extensive new group of works, made specifically for the commission. Ranging in scale from the domestic to the monumental, the works reprise and reinvent the themes that have come to define Lucas’s powerfully irreverent art – gender, death, sex, and the innuendo residing in everyday objects. Throughout this latest group of works, the body – sexual, comedic, majestic – remains a crucial point of return, while Lucas continues to confront big themes with a distinctive wit. “Humour,” she has remarked, “is about negotiating the contradictions thrown up by convention. To a certain extent humour and seriousness are interchangeable. Otherwise it wouldn’t be funny. Or devastating.”
Responding to the formal, neoclassical spaces of the British Pavilion, Lucas’s sculptures for Venice mark a dramatic new stage in her evolving iconography. Over the past few years, her soft sculptures in tights and wire have increasingly transmuted into bronze, resin and concrete. At the last Venice Biennale in 2013, she exhibited a sequence of gleaming bronze figures based on the twisting biomorphic forms of her NUDs sculptures. The latest works similarly channel the ambiguity and vulnerability of earlier compositions – whether the Bunny series of the late 1990s (disembodied legs fashioned from stuffed tights) or the later NUDs – while paradoxically exuding a classical permanence, heft and solidity.
At the centre of the exhibition stands Maradona, a grandiose figure in joyous repose – part man, part maypole, part praying mantis. Named after the iconic Argentine footballer, the figure squats on the ground while an enormous phallus soars majestically into the air. Its arched torso and gravity-defying erection are caught between earthbound and transcendent postures, treading a delicate line between beauty and buffoonery. The sculpture’s painted yellow surfaces (deep cream and gold cup) capture the organic texture of its bulbous stuffed nylon prototype. Combining corporeal resonances with sinuous ‘abstract’ form, Lucas’s new works evoke – and subtly subvert – the Modernist aesthetic of British artists such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, especially the recurring trope of the reclining nude or lone standing figure.
The female body features more literally in a series of plaster sculptures of fragmentary pairs of legs, gracefully animated through their combination with ordinary domestic furniture – a motif present in Lucas’s work since her earliest installations. These bawdy, empowered muses form a chorus line that upends the traditional objectification of the female form in male art history, while recalling the incomplete bodily casts Lucas has created throughout her career, such as You Know What (1998) or CNUT (2004).
Other works are more domestic in scale and subject. Lucas’s Tit Cat sculptures – again derived from models made from stuffed tights – combine the wiry forms of cats with tied-off, drooping orbs suggestive of breasts. Arching and prancing, their tails variously drooping and rearing, these strange metamorphic creatures epitomise the way Lucas’s art slides between real and surreal registers. In one work, a cat is presented atop a recliner chair and footstool, both items cast in bronze and concrete; in another, an octopus’s bronze tentacles sprawl over a workaday wooden chair (also fashioned from bronze), its lumpy extremities spilling erotically onto the floor. In both, domestic scenes are translated into weighty simulacra: the chair assuming the status of a throne, the animals of magical shape-shifters.
I SCREAM DADDIO is accompanied by a new book, designed by Julian Simmons and published by the British Council, with the generous support of the Art Fund. Additional thanks to Kvadrat for the production of a bespoke bag.
