The New Museum presents the first major exhibition of Sarah Lucas in the United States

The New Museum is pleased to present "Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel," on view from September 26, 2018 to January 20, 2019. The first major survey in the United States of the work of British artist Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, London, UK), the exhibition spans Lucas' entire career, bringing together some of her most iconic works and series from the late 1980s to today. "Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel" is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Margot Norton, Curator. Over the past thirty years, Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, Lucas has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into absurd and confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas's works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire. This presentation, which will take place across the three main floors of the New Museum, will bring together more than 150 works in photography, sculpture, and installation to reveal the breadth and ingenuity of her practice. It will feature some of Lucas' most important projects, including early sculptures from the 1990s that substitute domestic furniture for human body parts, and enlarged spreads from tabloid newspapers from the same period that reflect objectified representations of the female body. Alongside the photographic self-portraits that Lucas has produced throughout her career, the exhibition features biomorphic sculptures including her stuffed-stocking Bunnies (1997–ongoing) and NUDS (2009–ongoing), the Penetralia series (2008–ongoing), and selections from her installations at the Freud Museum in London (2000) and the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). These works, which complicate inscribed codes of sexual and social normativity, have never been shown together in the United States. Lucas is also creating new sculptural works for the exhibition, which will be exhibited in an installation on the New Museum's Fourth Floor. A fully illustrated catalogue co-published by the New Museum and Phaidon Press accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue includes an interview with Sarah Lucas conducted by Massimiliano Gioni, as well as contributions by Whitney Chadwick, Anne Ellegood, Angus Fairhurst, Quinn Latimer, Maggie Nelson, Linda Nochlin, Margot Norton, and Anne Wagner.