British Artist Sarah Lucas’s first survey show in the US is named by the title of her well-known sculpture “Au Nature”, in which sexual organs are represented by common objects and placed on a mattress. The french phrase “Au Nature” with the meaning of “ in the nature” and “in the nude” suggests both the idea of boldness in her works and the “natural” state under the social structure. It is a show simply about sex and genitals, but not simply about sexuality and eroticism.
Sexual organs are the main objects of her sculptures, in various forms or aspects. It could be straight forward like plaster male genitals sculpted in distinct scales with four sickles growing on the top or metaphoric as two oranges and a cucumber attach on a giant spring mattress. In either way, the viewers are put in front of these sexual contents by the most overwhelming way and led towards either a little intriguing humorous scene or an aggressive arguments of gender and power.
Metaphor and humor are the two most frequently used methods in her works. For instance, the series Bunnies and NUDS, in which figure-like stuffed-stocking with long limbs posting sexual suggesting postures on the chair perhaps has the same implied meaning to her series of enlarge newspapers with the erotic information which highly objectified women. It could be a sarcasm towards the society that objectify and dehumanize female, but it could also be the sneer to those woman under the society who are dehumanize themselves through putting those objectified labels on them. The most attractive part of her works is that there are so many different metaphors about the society in a single piece of work. There are always something more behind than what we could read.
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