Bunny Gets Snookered #3, 1997

Photo: Courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London
Installation view: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Collection as Aleph, Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria, 2008



Photo: Jen Fong Photography
Installation view: THIS IS NOT FOR YOU. Sculptural Discourses, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria, 2006-2007



Photo: Michael Strasser, 2006 | © Bildrecht, Vienna, 2017
Collection

Tan tights, green stockings, red office chair, clamp, kapok, wire
120 x 58 x 60 cm


Bunny Gets Snookered #3 is one of eight “bunny girls” sculptures by artist Sarah Lucas, which originally formed the installation Bunny Gets Snookered Since their first presentation in London on the occasion of its launch in 1997, the iconic Bunnys have moved to different institutions such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection. To create the sculptures, Lucas stuffed nude-color stockings with cushion padding, twisting them into weird hybrid body forms with features resembling human legs and arms, as well as elongated “bunny” ears. The glamorous and feminine connotations that these stockings might imply are juxtaposed with clothing as a banal everyday matter, de-mystified by their use in a different context.

Each version comes with slight alterations in color, presentation and in the choice of furniture: Bunny Gets Snookered #3 wears enticing green stockings, sits on a red cushioned office chair and has been arranged in an explicit sexual position—Lucas’s characteristic spread legs that draw focus on male or female genitalia. The mannequin is slackly positioned on the chair and turned into a humorous analogue of the human body, imitating a sexual conquest with a sort of post-coital, drained look. The object becomes the stand-in for unresponsive sexuality, bored with desire and impartial to violence. The sculpture of the bunny aligns with Lucas’s previous installations, moving around topics of gender roles, misogyny, and the objectification of the female body in popular culture. Indeed, in line with Surrealist tradition, she renders the bunny unappealing, bizarre and provocative in shape, and thereby disrupts male phantasies and the vulgarity of sexual language. (TBA21)

*1962 in London, United Kingdom | Living and working in London, United Kingdom
Sarah Lucas  is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged during the 1990s. Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour by incorporating photography, collage and found objects. Lucas's first solo commercial exhibition with Sadie Coles, Bunny Gets Snookered in 1997, was a great success and paved the way for her works Sod you Gits (1991), Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992) and Pauline Bunny (1997) to be included in the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy later in 1997. The Journalist Lynn Barber described Luca´s work as, "not scary, exactly, because it was too witty for that - but fuelled by anger; anger against pornography and men's casual denigration of women though Lucas responded to that suggestion by saying she was more "annoyed than angry."

The biography is from tate and the art story.