Take the song “Honey Pie” by the Beatles and turn it into a string quartet — that would be the perfect soundtrack for Sarah Lucas’s solo show at Sadie Coles HQ. Like the song by the Liverpool band, “Honey Pie” — and here I mean the exhibition — is a well-balanced combination of lightness and gravity, playfulness and austerity: a catchy visual roundelay made solemn and meditative by the artist’s disciplined rendition.
There are twelve sculptures on display, all created over the last three years, and arranged within a cross-shaped structure of concrete and MDF that segments the gallery space into four quadrants. Originating from Lucas’s celebrated “Bunny” series (first conceived in 1997), the works evoke female nudes reclining on chairs, or “muses” as the artist calls them: headless, contorted, equipped with exceptionally long limbs, multiple breasts, and colossal penises, which make some of them, if not just women, exquisitely womxn.
Although the subject is always the same — the female nude, disfigured and deconstructed, i.e., the critique of its objectification — the sculptures’ tone and materials differ in various ways. Six works are soft sculptures made out of stuffed tights, each posing on a chair and elevated on a plinth; their limbs are partially painted with bright colors and their feet wear flashy shoes, which give them a camp, cheerful quality. These are mirrored by an equal number of pieces consisting of bronze anatomies (all molded from soft prototypes) sitting on concrete and metal casts of chairs; in opposition to the others, they look more sober, almost classical in a way, like statues whose bodily contortions appear to have lost any human attributes.
Such a symphony of contrasts (soft vs. hard, light-hearted vs. austere) and similarities (the tubular anatomies and the figure-chair composition) is very accurately laid out across the space: the effect is an irregular symmetry, emphasized by the cruciform wall, which frames and organizes the sculptures, negotiating the pace of the viewer’s gaze. This show is fresh and campy, but structured and classical all the same — like a song by the Beatles arranged in the style of Vivaldi.
