Bananas, chairs, cigarettes, lightbulbs, fish: domestic items are mischievously anthropomorphised in ‘Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas’, the artist’s major retrospective at Tate Britain, London. Over 75 pieces, spanning four decades and including new work, juxtapose materials and methodologies while gently distorting human life with Sarah Lucas’ characteristic playful panache.
Early works, including pieces made from tabloid newspaper spreads in 1990, join early sculptures and later works in bronze, resin and concrete, such as the concrete Eames Chair, 2015. Large-scale self-portraits throughout the years, nude plaster casts and installations nod to both Lucas’ considerations of the objectification of the female body and explorations into materiality.