Sarah Lucas

At the top of the steps to the Henry Moore Institute, two large concrete squashes, Untitled, 2006–12, flank the entrance to Sarah Lucas’s latest exhibition. Lucas is known for phallic foodstuffs, and these two also call to mind her celebrated Self Portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996, a photograph of the artist sitting slumped in a chair, fully clothed, with a fried egg placed on each breast. “Ordinary Things,” however, draws broadly from Lucas’s wide-ranging exploration of sculpture over the past two decades, including pieces from the early 1990s and her recent work.

The ambience of the first gallery is sordid: A pair of beige tights stuffed with fluff sprawls out on a chair with legs open expectantly, as Au Naturel, 1994, a stained mattress propped up against the gallery wall, beds two melons, a metal bucket, a cucumber, and oranges––the sleazy tableau of a regrettable one-night stand. Five pieces from the series “NUDS,” 2009–, are positioned throughout the second gallery. They, too, are made of tights and stuffing, but they sit on plinths of various heights, built from medium-density fiberboard and cinder blocks. The stuffing that bulges forth looks like dimpled flesh as the shapes twist and coil, seemingly folding in on themselves to hide from the unforgiving gallery lights. The third gallery contains a row of concrete casts of British grocery items such as a corncob and tinned pie in a row on a shelf. Once perishable but now frozen in time, they appear petrified and comical, mundane objects that have suddenly reached relic status by being preserved.