Charlie's delight, 2002
Sarah Lucas

Photo: Courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, 2002
Collection

Photocopy on packing paper
115 x 140 cm


Part of Lucas's extensive body of work is dedicated to Charlie George, a star player of one of the top London soccer clubs, Arsenal, during the 1970s. Lucas grew up in the same gritty working class neighborhood as George, who in the artist's youth represented dreams of stardom and escape. In this series of works, Lucas uses her relationship with the soccer star as a touchstone for a complicated investigation of identity, success, and marketing. Also Lucas seems to speak to the commodification of bodies in sports, and in society generally. As much as it celebrates Charlie George and represents dreams and their realization, it also depicts the underbelly of certain aspects of late-stage capitalism- a stance perfectly attuned to the tradition of political commentary in much collage, to which Lucas knowingly nods with this work.


*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.