Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas – Tate Britain, London

An artist-curated show, Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas isn’t your usual retrospective.

Content warning: mildly NSFW

Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas

Tate Britain’s current exhibition programming is a veritable cornucopia of modern and contemporary female artists. There’s Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990. There are free exhibitions of work by Zeinab Saleh and Rhea Dillon. And there is, of course, the subject of today’s post: Sarah Lucas, with the exhibition Happy Gas.

Lucas, born in 1962 in London, studied art at Goldsmiths College among other places. But it was the people she met at Goldsmiths who left an indelible mark on Lucas’s artistic future. Exhibiting in key exhibitions like Freeze and later Sensation, Lucas is indelibly linked to the so-called YBAs, the Young British Artists who came to prominence in the 1990s. Their work and their approach to art as an activity and a business captured the Zeitgeist of the period.

But Lucas’s consistent artistic output speaks to a career which stretches far beyond her early work. And this exhibition, at Tate Britain, is Lucas in her own words. Often literally. Happy Gas consists of works selected by Lucas, staged by her, and with the artist’s voice guiding the viewer through the exhibition. It lets us into Lucas’s process, and shares with us something of her humour and critical reflections on society. It’s also nice to see her so present, with blown-up photographs of the artist taking up entire walls.

An Artist’s Exhibition

Happy Gas is a simple exhibition. Four rooms, containing (I would estimate) fewer than 100 works. The works are grouped thematically rather than chronologically, allowing us as visitors to see the evolution of some series and trains of thought. Some of Lucas’s key preoccupations are clear from the get-go. First amongst these is a mirroring of society back to itself. Often this is done in an interesting way which does not necessarily engage in the debate, merely highlights it. I’m thinking here of Lucas’s series of enlarged tabloid spreads from the 1990s: a twist on ‘found object‘ art which makes us uncomfortable by spotlighting what we don’t ordinarily notice.

The second constant in Lucas’s work which is obvious from the first room is her humour. Many of her works refer to sex and sexuality but in a way that is humorous rather than explicit or confronting. Wanker, 1999, is a good example. A chair with a mechanical arm (engaged in a certain motion I’m sure you can imagine), Wanker is funny precisely because the chair is empty. The second room contains decades of Lucas’s Bunny series: female forms on chairs. The early ones are constructed of tights, with seams and knots to suggest nipples and labia. More recent ones play with materials, cast in resin or metal. There’s something of the Jeff Koons about this, only Koons aims to be provocative where Lucas is playful. His female figures are of the adult film variety, where Lucas’s are interruptions of the male gaze.

Motifs Develop

As we move through the exhibition, these ideas progress. Playing with materials, reflecting us back to ourselves. Other frequent Lucas motifs appear, like objects carefully stuck with hundreds of cigarettes. The giant sandwich we saw at the Barbican once is back. Casts of female pelvises, cigarettes clasped between… well, use your imagination… again bring to mind our society’s discourse on women and sexuality without overtly engaging in it. I have not yet been to the exhibition of radical feminist artists downstairs at Tate Britain, but I imagine the dialogue is an interesting one. Lucas manages to constantly bring women, men and sex into her art without being a feminist artist per se. This again brings me back to her humour: making implied genitals of all shapes and sizes into a bit of fun, a visual joke shared with the audience.

Like fellow YBA Cornelia Parker’s exhibition at Tate Britain last year, Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas is a great opportunity to get to know an artist’s work better, and on their own terms. It’s a nice size of exhibition, where you can take everything in without reaching overload. Although one down side to an artist curating their own exhibition is that it looks great, but could be more accessible. There’s a certain irony to a room where all the sculptures are sitting on chairs, but the only seating for visitors is off in the corner where you can’t really see the works. The exhibition is on for another few weeks, and is definitely worth seeing whether your interest is contemporary art, female artists, YBAs, or the creative use of tights, dentures and large concrete marrows.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3.5/5

Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas on until 14 January 2024