Sarah Lucas
For her first New York solo exhibition in nearly a decade, Sarah Lucas delivers a sangfroid, Freudian slip of a show, anticipating and upending the lurid expectations of her audience with a hard-edged humor much darker than her one-liner premise. The exhibition’s title, “Nud Nob,” refers to the artist’s 2009–2010 series of “Nuds,” anthropomorphic sculptures fashioned from panty hose. She has now cast similar forms in bronze, as if to trade fetish for finish and the weight of art-historical reference points. All sloppy sausage limbs and Brancusi-bird erections, the figures still carry on their contorted coitus, but the show’s central thrust comes from a semiotic showdown between two sets of sculptures, all 2013. The first is a pair of gleaming bronze squashes, spanning an impressive seventeen feet and fifteen feet, respectively, and bearing names—Kevin and Florian—more reminiscent of maybe-bedmates than of pantry staples. The more modestly sized (eleven feet and nine feet) Eros and Priapus are cast-concrete phalluses, impeccably rendered and mounted on compacted car parts, like hijacked John Chamberlains. In lieu of testicles—the exhibition has balls only in the idiomatic sense—Priapus boasts a handle similar to a dagger, or perhaps a turkey baster (a comparison encouraged by the backdrop of Chicken Knickers, 2014, a photograph of a slender pelvis, its crotch blocked by plucked poultry).
For all its brash, whip-’em-out swagger, “Nud Nob,” actually champions innuendo, with the power of vegetal suggestion more compelling than anatomic articulation. Lucas may call upon the almighty Phallus, but she does so with an irony that skirts the lines between veneration and castration. In the back room, the second of the concrete sculptures, Eros, the grand inquisitive, is attended by the muses of Eating a Banana, 2014, six floor-to-ceiling photographs of the artist fellating the half-peeled fruit. Potential titillation is held in check by Lucas’s gaze, dead-eyed and defiant, as if to say: “What, haven’t I given you what you wanted?”
