Sarah Lucas: POWER IN WOMAN

Sir John was continual ly, over a l i fetime, col lect ing and extending his house to accommodate his collection. The whole edifice is his work of art. Strange then to intervene in his picture, temporari ly.
Sarah Lucas

In spring 2016, Sir John Soane’s Museum will present POWER IN WOMAN, an exhibition by British artist Sarah Lucas. Three sculptures will be displayed in the North Drawing Room, each depicting a female figure in cast plaster. These works were first shown last year as part of Lucas’s acclaimed commission by the British Council for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, I SCREAM DADDIO. The custard-yellow colour scheme of the Venice exhibition was inspired in part by the walls of Soane’s drawing rooms. Lucas’s contemporary bodies will here be set in a powerful dialogue with the Soane’s intimate spaces and extensive collection of classical casts.

This marks the first UK exhibition of Lucas’s works from the Venice Biennale, and it is made possible with the support of the Art Fund. This is a very rare occasion on which a living artist has situated works amid the Soane’s multi-layered collections. Over the course of two decades, Lucas has become recognised as one of Britain’s most significant contemporary artists. Spanning sculpture, photography and installation, her work has consistently been characterised by irreverent humour and the use of everyday ‘readymade’ objects – furniture, food, tabloid newspapers, tights, toilets, cigarettes – to conjure up sexual puns and corporeal fragments. Press contacts at Caro Communications, 020 7713 9388, @carocomms Marta Bogna: marta@carocommunications.com; Luke Neve: luke@carocommunications.com The three sculptures that will appear at the Soane derive from a series of ten bodies in cast plaster, collectively titled the Muses, for which Lucas used various friends as models. Each presents the female body as literally ‘topless’ – a pair of legs arrested at the waist, adopting a range of poses from the coy to the confrontational. The figures of Yoko and Pauline are seated, poised or relaxed, on chairs. The naked body of Michele lies on a desktop, legs apart, in both an echo and a subversion of the tradition of the reclining female nude.

In form and material, Lucas’s sculptures mirror the classical plaster casts that Soane accumulated over his life, and which fill the Colonnade and Museum Corridor at the rear of the building. As in these antique examples, Lucas condenses the body into a dramatic gesture. And yet her Muses are also strikingly real: “Soane’s plasters are casts from the marble originals”, she has explained. “Mine, on the other hand, are cast direct from the woman in question using the rough and ready method of making a waste mould by applying plaster bandage directly onto the body. The mould doesn’t survive … There’s very little room in the process for refining the figure or otherwise idealising it.”