One of the most enduring of the Young British Artists, Sarah Lucas, now 60, could have rested on her laurels. For her big Tate Britain show, she could have delivered a greatest hits show, one that emphasised her role in the 1990s YBA scene alongside old friend and sometime collaborator Damien Hirst. Instead, with typical, wicked but thoughtful irreverence, Lucas has chosen not to stage a grand retrospective.
Several of her brutally punning, abjectly sexual sculptures from the height of the YBA era are conspicuously absent: no Two Fried Eggs and Kebab (1992) — the titular foodstuffs slapped on a humdrum table to form the most sardonic of reclining nudes — and no Au Naturel (1994), that soiled mattress that featured in the infamous Sensation show in 1997 at the Royal Academy, with sewn-in lewd objects — melons and a bucket for her, oranges and a cucumber for him. The Shop, the anarchic premises she and Tracey Emin ran on the Bethnal Green Road in 1993, goes unmentioned; no archival photographs, no ephemeral souvenirs.
