Moving ahead with radical puns

With her provocative, raw and sometimes shocking aesthetics, Sarah Lucas inserted herself into the concept of the Young British Artists in the 1990s. At the time, the group of young artists was reacting to Thatcher's conservative policies in Great Britain. She called her debut exhibition »Penis nailed to a Board« (1992), stating unequivocally what she intended with her art.

In 2005, the Hamburg Kunstverein attested to her »radical pun«: her installations and assemblages of discarded furniture, food, found objects, newsprint, wood, wire, etc. were usually sexually charged. She gave them »drastic titles« based on an ambiguous, casual working-class language. Breasts, phalli and long, rubbery legs flatten there on office and bar stools or knot themselves to a biomorphic ball.

This is probably the only way she achieved the attention of the British and later the international cultural landscape. Then as now, she criticized firmly established social norms and gender roles. In her self-portraits, she stages herself - with male connotations, she poses with her legs wide open, eating a banana.

Sarah Lucas knew how to shake people up - and that's why today she's considered one of the best-known representatives of the Young British Artists and their generation of artists. Lucas turns 60 today, and Art.Salon congratulates her on everything she has achieved so far - and everything she will achieve in the future.