The first big woman to greet you on arrival at Colchester’s Firstsite gallery is Fat Doris. She’s wearing black tights and brown wedge shoes and is instantly recognisable as a Sarah Lucas bunny, except this woman is no longer provocatively slutty with legs akimbo, but is slouched in an armchair, with rolls of stomach that erupt into four tied-off sausage ends, representing both boobs and brains. As an evocation of the status of older women, she packs an undeniable punch, but she also embodies the curatorial weakness of this show: it’s not about making radical new connections, but about being part of a cool gang with origins in Freeze, the 1988 show that created the YBA brand and made Lucas’s name.
