Thirty-five years ago the Young British Artists crashed into Britain’s senescent art world and dumped two fried eggs and a kebab on its top table. Or at least that was the myth. Now Sarah Lucas, toughest of the YBAs, is 63, her fried eggs and kebab are art history, and she’s besties with Maggi Hambling, 80, one of the last of the old-school painters. Lucas admires Hambling not just as an artist but a woman, and in Maggi the Maggi, she has created a loving, heroic image of Hambling’s face made entirely of cigarettes. Hambling returns the compliment with Sarah at Work which, like all her paintings here, is a slapdash mess. But it’s hard to pay much attention to Hambling’s daubs when your eyes are full of balloon breasts (by which I mean boobs moulded on party balloons), shiny red bums thrust in the air, floppy phallic ears and spindly pipe cleaner legs wearing shoes Lucas must have bought in bulk from a fetish shop.
In the latest iteration of her Bunny sculptures, laughable yet tragic creatures that render the Playboy Bunny absurdly literal, Sarah Lucas creates orgiastic hilarity and aesthetic mayhem. Limbs, eyes, nipples are everywhere as these poor things pose on concrete chairs in a style you might find in an exclusive sex club, or a male fantasy of some such place. It’s the stuff of the manosphere’s wildest dreams, a lurid monument to hyped-up internet-driven porn. Yet furious feminist satire is just one dimension to Lucas’s extraordinary works.
