Sarah Lucas at the Hammer

Sarah Lucas is an artist I’ve admired for decades but I’ve only been able to see individual pieces or photographs. Her survey at the Hammer Museum, Au Naturel, offers an opportunity to see the British artist’s 30-year exploration of sex as power, and vice versa.

Sarah Lucas, Sod You Gits, 1991. Photocopy on paper, 85 3/4 x 124 in (218 x 315 cm). © Sarah Lucas. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

Lucas, however, is no victim. Since the early 1990s, she has been the sort of woman and artist who defied the tacit restrictions that cropped up around what a Feminist artist could and could not get away with. Instead, she grabbed the strategies implicit in the art of men to make her sharp-edged statements.

Sarah Lucas, Self-portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996. C-print, 60 x 48 in (152.4 x 121.9 cm). © Sarah Lucas. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

It was a loose curriculum, perfect for an artist finding her way. Though she and artist Tracy Emins took a commercial space that they called The Shop, she didn’t bother getting a studio — too expensive — and learned to make work out of what was at hand. That included the 1992 pair of fried eggs and a kebab suggestively arranged on a wooden table and recreated daily at the Hammer. (Even as a successful artist, she works on the kitchen table in her Suffolk home.)

Sarah Lucas, Bunny Gets Snookered #9, 1997. Tan tights, yellow stockings, office chair, clamp, kapok and wire, 41 × 18 7⁄8 × 26 in. (104 × 48 × 66 cm). Collection of Stephen and Yana Peel, London. © Sarah Lucas. Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London

Lucas does indeed lay it bare here and everywhere in this show. There is the Bunnies series of 1997, made with stuffed pantyhose stuck on office chairs with multiple legs jotting in all directions so the focus is pretty much in only one place. The smashed carcass of a car is topped with a huge white plaster phallus. The plaster casts of naked women are bent over toilets, to wretch, or tables in sexual offering.

Sarah Lucas, NUD 18, 2009. Tights, fluff, and wire, 11 3/4 x 14 1/8 x 12 5/8 in (30 x 36 x 32 cm). © Sarah Lucas. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

Among the strongest series in the show is Penetralia, which begins in 2008. Instead of lamenting, criticizing or arguing about the power of patriarchy, Lucas seizes it, literally. Like the groupie plaster casters of Sunset Strip rock clubs, she has memorialized the male members of lovers, friends and blokes from the pub. These plaster phalluses relate to ancient sculpture, Indian lingams and outsized dildos. They point quite literally to the source — real, imagined or culturally determined — of power, and appropriate it. At the Hammer, they are commandingly installed before an amber colored gallery containing her recent Nuds, stuffed, rounded, emphatically female forms, mostly made of tights stuffed with fluff, that wind around upon themselves. The exhaulted art of Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth is reenergized in her hands. In the midst of this gathering, a hemispherical nest made of net spheres, like breasts, hangs in space, as inviting as a bizarre swing.

through September 1.