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Sarah Lucas
Dacre, 2013

Installation view: Abundant Futures. Works from the TBA21 Collection, Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía C3A, Córdoba, Spain, 2022

Photo: Roberto Ruiz

Sarah Lucas

Collection

Abundant Futures

Cast bronze, plinth (breeze blocks, concrete paving slab)
61.5 x 49 x 65.5 cm (sculpture)
84 x 45 x 45 cm (plinth)

Exploring issues of gender and sex, the British artist Sarah Lucas probes into male-female dualism and advances androgyny and the blurring of boundaries as tools of resistance. Since the early 2000s, her artistic production has incorporated nonfigurative, organic, and biomorphic elements that are fluid and transitional, suggesting an affinity with identity formations. Transgressing form, materiality, and temporality, her objects overthrow normative definitions of human life and eventually propose new variations.

Dacre is one of a series of six bronze sculptures translating the artist’s earlier NUDS (2009–), in which kapok-filled nylon tights are molded into ambiguous biomorphic forms made of gold-hued metal. Dacre fuses two beings into a single entity, held together in an embrace of their long, slender arms. The figure’s frosty elegance is heightened when light shimmers on the highly polished surface. It recalls the image of a caring mother and her child, embracing lovers, or a protective guardian. The golden hue links the bronze to the material history of gold, resonating particularly with Byzantine icons, golden Buddha statues, or over-the-top Versailles. But also, from a posthumanist viewpoint, Dacre snatches at the cocksure figure of the “human” and renders visible the animality of homo sapiens.

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Group exhibition: Abundant Futures
Venue: C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba
Curator: Daniela Zyman
Exhibition 1 April 2022 - 5 March 2023

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE ESSAY

Oona Zyman, "Anatomy of Desires," in Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary: The Commissions Book,, eds. Eva Ebersberger and Daniela Zyman (2020: Sternberg Press)