Sarah Lucas

Sarah Lucas is a Contemporary British artist known for her sculptures, photographs and performances, which often play on humorous puns or bawdy themes. Lucas is a member of the Young British Artists (Y.B.A.) grouping which emerged in the final decade of the 20th century.

Lucas was born in London, England in 1962. She studied art at The Working Men's College, London College of Printing and Goldsmith's College, ultimately earning her BFA in 1987.

The 1988 group exhibition Freeze, a historic showing of Young British Artists including Damien Hirst, Angus Fairhurst and Gary Hume, included works by Lucas. In 1990, Lucas co-organized the East Country Yard Show with visual artist Henry Bond; in a review for Artforum, critic Kate Bush wrote that “[Hirst's] Freeze anticipated a spate of do-it-yourself group shows staged in cheap, sprawling, ex-industrial spaces in recession-hit East London. Henry Bond and Sarah Lucas's East Country Yard Show as well as Carl Freedman and Billee Sellman's Modern Medicine and Gambler, all in 1990, were, with Freeze, the shows that fueled the myth of YBA as, paradoxically, both oppositional and entrepreneurial.”

Lucas’s first solo exhibition took place in 1992 at the City Racing gallery in London; her first New York exhibition took place in 1995 at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery. In the following years, a number of international museums held exhibitions of Lucas’s work, including the Walker Art Center, the Royal Academy and Tate Britain. Lucas participated in the Venice Biennale in 2003, and again in 2015. In 2005/2005, Tate Liverpool held the first retrospective of Lucas’s work.

Today, Lucas lives and works in Aldeburgh, a small English town on the North sea coast. Lucus’s artwork is owned by a number of public collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.