Sarah Lucas

NUD 25

About this artwork

This sculpture from 2010 is one in a series of works numbered and titled NUD. The NUDs, shaped with wire, into unsettling, knotted forms, are a continuation of Lucas’s earlier work made using stuffed nylon tights. In 1997 she made the installation and exhibition Bunny Gets Snookered at Sadie Coles Gallery in London, for which she stuffed different coloured pairs of tights with cotton wadding to make Playboy ‘bunny girl’ forms. Arranged around a snooker table – positioned as a symbol of macho masculinity – these drooping, anonymous figures appeared passive and powerless. Bunny Gets Snookered presented a challenge to the ways in which the female body is distorted and objectified by the male gaze. The NUDs are somewhat more ambiguous. Their forms and textures evoke the body – entrails, dimpled flesh, varicose veins, bulging swellings, distorted intertwining limbs – yet they are ambivalently gendered, even pushing at the bounds of humanness. The NUDs retain a similar erotic sensuality to Lucas’s earlier soft sculptures, meanwhile suggesting something altogether more abject. As such, they cannot be reduced to a singular reading.

Published September 2022

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Sarah Lucas

Sarah Lucas