“Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel is the first major survey in the United States of the work of British artist Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, London, UK). The exhibition spans Lucas’s entire career, bringing together some of her most iconic works and series from the late 1980s to today. Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Margot Norton, Curator. 

Over the past thirty years, Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, Lucas has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into absurd and confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire.

The title of the exhibition, ‘Au Naturel,’ is taken from a sculpture Lucas created in 1994, in which an assemblage of objects suggestive of sexual organs adorns a mattress that slumps in the corner as if it were reclining. In an art historical context, ‘au naturel’ commonly refers to paintings of female nude figures, and literally translates from French as ‘in the nude.’ Applying the term to Lucas’s greater body of work, the title speaks to the immediacy, intimacy, and directness of her images and speculates on the possibility of a natural state, perhaps without the limitations of established social structures and gender conformity.” — New Museum  

Photographs by Corrado Serra.