Sarah Lucas has taken the British Pavilion and made it exuberantly, but also elegantly her own. Her initial inspiration was apparently a dessert—specifically Iles Flottantes—(very appropriate for Venice) and all the galleries have been painted a zinging custard yellow, populated by white plaster casts of what she calls her “muses”, which could be read as the sculptural substitute for the floating meringues. Yet this jokiness is just one aspect of what is one of the strongest British pavilions in recent years, and which confirms Lucas’s strength and maturity as a sculptor.
There are still many of the classic Sarah Lucas elements that we associate with this most bawdy, bodily and throat-grabbing of artists—but they have been distilled into a serious sequence of all new sculptures that sit comfortably with the history of art, as well as the history of her own work. (Fried eggs are also yellow and white, after all.)
The emphatically, outrageously male fluid forms of her giant buttercup yellow resin sculpture, Gold Cup Maradona, who bends and stretches and bares his limbs across the entrance certainly subvert the polite neoclassicism of the British Pavilion’s entrance—his erect member even bisects the Gran Bretagna sign—but he also has a meaningful conversation with Henry Moore (whose Double Standing Figure occupied exactly the same spot in 1948). The anarchic, vividly coloured sculpture of Lucas’s late friend, Franz West, and of course Louise Bourgeois’s Arch of Hysteria are also invoked.
There’s another thrusting yellow Maradona in the first room. Like his companion, he’s a greatly expanded masculine version of the bronze nudes Lucas showed at Venice in 2013—but his looming scale is also handled with formal acuity and he holds the space with aplomb. It is a rarity to see a single Lucas sculpture in a gallery: her last major show at the Whitechapel was a crammed, cacophonous affair, but throughout the British Pavilion, a honed rigour prevails.
After the two yellow Maradonas, the mood turns emphatically female with a procession of elegant female nudes cast from the bottom half of her close friends. Two are casts of Lucas herself and one is of her gallerist Sadie Coles. There’s nothing tabloid about these timeless, topless nymphs who recline and pose across pieces of furniture, a fridge and even in one case a cast concrete toilet. Their nakedness and even the cigarettes that poke cheekily from their various orifices are more poignant than provocative – and they show that although Lucas is now embracing the grand and the art historical, her work has also lost none of its ability to be utterly human and intimate.