This week we check out Rose Bush at number 4 New Burlington Place.
Sadie Coles Gallery presents, ‘Rose Bush’, an exhibition of largely new work by Not So Young Anymore British Artist, Sarah Lucas in a space dedicated to her work on the first floor of the gallery.
‘Situation’ channels the spirit of the artist-led exhibitions of the late 1980s and 1990s with which Lucas and her contemporaries launched their careers. It is a wonderfully unpolished, starkly lit space that is sympathetic to and congruent with the nonchalant, unabashed and unapologetic quality of Lucas’ work.
Lucas has long made work in specific, sometimes remote and often unusual locations and ‘Untitled’ (2012), a vast pair of over the knee platform boots cast in concrete, is no exception as the installation shots, blown up and printed as wall paper, indicate. Lucas’ boots are brazenly, unashamedly fetishistic.
Equally brazen and yet subtly, semiotically suggestive is ‘Maggi’ (2012) composed of a coat hanger suspended from the ceiling attached to which are two lit light bulbs and the gaping hole of an excavated toilet bowl. It is shocking perhaps, how easily we convince ourselves of the representative quality of this crude construction of the female body. ’Maggi’ is only a woman because I see it/her to be so. Its formal concerns, the geometry of its sculpture, its wholeness in parts, endow the whole with meaning, thus light bulbs equal breasts and the vacant, endless, expectant depth of the toilet bowl equals a vagina. Both ‘Maggi’ and the boots seem at once to implicate and to defy a principally male erotic gaze, posing questions, they discomfit, disconcert and yet remain resolutely and frustratingly perhaps, reticent.
‘Rose Bush’ runs from now until 30th December 2012.
All images courtesy of Sadie Coles c. Sarah Lucas.
