Sarah Lucas
"Penetralia"
Rue du Grand Cerf 12 Grote Hertstraat, 1000
Brussels
November 18 through December 23
Opening Wednesday, November
17,
6-9pm
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Gladstone
Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by British artist Sarah Lucas.
Since the 1990s, Lucas has been developing a unique material vocabulary using
everyday domestic items such as stockings, clothing hangers, lightbulbs, and
beer cans to create objects that challenge our collectively inscribed codes of
gender, sexual, and social normativity. In this exhibition Lucas uses the male
genitalia as her muse, capturing the tension between the representational and
the abstract, while retaining the insistent and underlying anxiety imbued in her
particular mode of the
abject.
In this exhibition of new and older works, Lucas continues to explore
the themes and ideas at play within her 2008 series of the same title,
"Penetralia." Employing similar strategies of production, such as cast concrete,
plaster, and fiberglass, these works engage the figure of the phallus with an
intense formal clarity and wit. While the symbolic power of the phallus allows
Lucas to play with an overt level of content and signification, she is also
equally attentive to the basic conditions of the sculptural object implied in
composition, weight, balance, and materiality. These aesthetic details animate
Lucas' otherwise brute erections, rendering their contours, surface, and
structure into an elegant and formal investigation of the phallus. Throughout
her work, Lucas has both explicitly and suggestively conjured the image of the
penis as both a controversial cultural icon as well as a banal human body part,
remarking upon the male organ as the ideal stand-alone sculpture. In drawing
parallels between the physicality of both the sculptural object and the male
organ, Lucas slyly alludes to the shared history of power and preferences:
verticality over horizonality, exterior versus interior, convex versus concave,
visibility opposed to invisibility. Linguistic tropes and puns have consistently
informed Lucas' multivalent and at times evasive layering of meaning, perfectly
exemplified in the title "Penetralia," essentially defined as, "the innermost,
the most private or secret parts." This title cleverly conflates its two
inter-related terms, the penetrated (the "innermost") and the penetrator (the
phallic object), by enacting a slippage in meaning between text and
object.
Born in Holloway, London in 1962, Lucas has been the subject of numerous
major solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally including: Museum of
Cycladic Arts, Athens; Kunsthalle Zurich; Milton Keynes Gallery, U.K.; and
Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen,
Holland.
For further information please contact Gael
Diercxsens:
+32 2 513 35 31 or
gael@gladstonegallery.com
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Friday, 10am-6pm Saturday,
12-6pm
515 West 24th
Street
Wangechi
Mutu
“Hunt Bury
Flee”
October 29 through December
4
530 West 21st
Street
Ugo
Rondinone
“nude”
November 6 through December
23
530 West 21st Street, Second
floor
Marisa Merz
“Living
Sculpture”
October 7 through November
20
Gallery Hours: Tuesday –Saturday,
10am-6pm
Gladstone
Gallery.
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