An excerpt: “Over a third of the works in Sarah Lucas’s first stateside retrospective are from her early years as part of the Young British Artists (YBA) group, beginning with the sculpture Au Naturel (1994), from which the exhibition takes its title. The now infamous tableau made from found objects and perishable food was an early enactment of the kind of abject shorthand for body parts that has since defined her aesthetic. The work features a yellow-stained mattress sitting on the floor, slumped against the wall. Two melons positioned above a metal bucket and an upright cucumber stuck between a pair of oranges are set on top, completing the visual pun.
Yet perhaps because of the dubiousness of the YBA legacy thirty years on, the exhibition’s wall texts and catalogue essays downplay the association in favor of more gender-based readings that also sidestep the role of class intrinsic to much YBA work. A group of brash DIY-styled artists who came of age in a post-Thatcher world marred by economic recession, rancorous class divisions, and tabloid sensationalism, the YBAs were defined by their shared use of found objects, shock tactics, and mass media. Their interest in the base realities of sex, death, and materialism channeled a working-class cynicism toward high art that artists like Lucas expressed through crude humor and accessible metaphors.”
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