Sarah Lucas
NUDS Cycladic

Each is made from nylon tights stuffed with pale-coloured fluff and twisted into an ambiguous, biomorphic form. The works lean towards primitivism and abstraction, a self-reflecting series that moves away from the gender-based critique of her work in the 1990s and takes the earlier figurative ‘bunny’ sculpture series to a more abstract form.

The indeterminate organic shapes of the NUDS, offset by plinths of stacked breeze blocks, recall the smooth-contoured sculptures of British Modernists such as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. The influence of other canonical figures, notably Hans Bellmer and Louise Bourgeois, is manifested by the works’ suggestion of limbs, breasts, orifices and other corporeal fragments.

In the context of the Μuseum of Cycladic Art, by playfully referencing the smooth and stylized female forms of Cycladic figurines, Lucas’s transformation of nylon stockings into twisted bodily contortions constitutes a feminist response to such canonical sculpture. The best-known objects from this period (3rd millenium BC), however, are strangely modern, marble representations of the naked female form. Lucas has clearly drawn on these influences, whilst continuing to subvert expectations about how the human (and particularly female) body is depicted.