Sarah Lucas
Blue Bunny, 2025 Tights, wire, wool, clamps, shoes, acrylic paint, chair 126 x 52 x 77 cm 49 5/8 x 20 1/2 x 30 3/8 inches Sadie Coles HQ
Founded in London in 1997 by Sadie Coles, Sadie Coles HQ is a leading contemporary art gallery representing more than fifty established and emerging artists from around the world.
Renowned for its critically influential programme, the gallery has played a pivotal role in shaping contemporary art in Britain over the past two decades and is closely associated with many of the Young British Artists (YBAs).
Coles herself has been widely recognised for her impact on the art world, most recently through GARGLE, the gallery’s new invitational live-events platform.
Before opening her own space, Coles spent six formative years working with eminent dealer Anthony d’Offay. The gallery’s debut presentation—an exhibition by American painter John Currin—was paired with Sarah Lucas’s solo project The Law in an empty Clerkenwell office, setting the tone for a gallery committed to international dialogue and to artists who push beyond the traditional white-cube format.
Since its founding, Sadie Coles HQ has occupied several distinctive sites across London. Today the gallery operates permanently from two spaces—on Kingly Street in Soho and Bury Street in St James’s—and will open a third location in autumn 2025: a six-storey Georgian townhouse on Savile Row in Mayfair.
The gallery’s roster spans more than fifty artists across diverse practices, nurturing new talent while maintaining long-standing collaborations with figures such as Sarah Lucas, Matthew Barney, Ugo Rondinone, Urs Fischer, and Richard Prince.
Coles has represented Lucas since the gallery’s inception, and also oversees the estate of Angus Fairhurst. Expanding its generational reach, the gallery added artists including Alex Da Corte, Borna Sammak, Kati Heck, Martine Syms and Lawrence Lek in 2018, and more recently Agnes Scherer, Tau Lewis, and Dada Khanyisa in 2024.
Active across the global art scene, Sadie Coles HQ regularly participates in major fairs such as Frieze London, Tokyo Gendai, West Bund in Shanghai, and Art Basel in Paris, Hong Kong, and Basel.
Sarah Lucas is a British sculptor, photographer, and installation artist who represented the UK at the 2015 Venice Biennale and was the subject of Happy Gas, a major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2023–24.
A central figure in the YBA movement, Lucas has spent more than three decades producing work that confronts issues of gender, sexuality, mortality, and class with characteristic irreverence and a formally inventive approach to assemblage.
Born in London in 1962, Lucas studied at the Working Men’s College, the London College of Printing, and Goldsmiths, graduating with a BA in Fine Art in 1987.
At Goldsmiths, she formed connections with Damien Hirst, Angus Fairhurst, and Michael Landy—relationships that would anchor the rise of the YBAs. Shortly after graduating, she took part in Freeze (1988),
Hirst’s landmark exhibition in a derelict Docklands warehouse that announced the emergence of a new generation of provocative British artists.
Through the early 1990s, Lucas developed a distinctive artistic language rooted in appropriation, wordplay, and the transformative use of everyday materials.
Sarah Lucas Like a buzz, 2025 Bronze, paint, lacquer, concrete, steel 86.5 x 71 x 96 cm 34 1/8 x 28 x 37 7/8 inches Sadie Coles HQ
In 1993, she collaborated with Tracey Emin to open The Shop in Bethnal Green, an artist-run retail space emblematic of the YBAs’ entrepreneurial spirit.
During this period, furniture emerged as a central structural and symbolic device in her work, functioning as both sculptural support and proxy for the human body.
Working across multiple media, Lucas uses sculpture, photography, and installation to interrogate desire, embodiment, and the politics of representation through stark humour and unflinching directness.
Her sculptures—employing materials such as stuffed tights, plaster, cast bronze, and found objects—convert the ordinary into figures that are by turns comedic, unsettling, and sexually charged.
Her self-portrait photographs resist traditional modes of feminine representation, reclaiming bodily agency through blunt, confrontational imagery.
In the early 1990s, Lucas explored the legacy of the readymade, blending Pop sensibilities with domestic and craft materials.
Au Naturel (1994), arranged from a mattress and fruit to evoke male and female genitalia, epitomised the bawdy visual puns and cultural critique that shaped her early practice.
Works like Bitch (1995) collapsed distinctions between art and consumer culture while addressing feminist debates around objectification.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lucas refined a sculptural vocabulary built around furniture assemblage.
Works such as The Old Couple (1992) and Hysterical Attack (2000) used household objects to explore existential tension with grotesque humour.
Her later plaster cast series—including CNUT (2004) and Pauline, Sadie and Me (Bar Stool)—demonstrated an ongoing interest in fragmented bodies and their capacity to disrupt conventional viewing.
Since the early 2000s, Lucas has continually expanded her celebrated Bunny sculptures—constructions of stuffed hosiery and wood that merge animal forms with erotic innuendo.
Her more recent bronze and resin works (2019–2023) revisit earlier motifs with renewed material complexity, such as in SUGAR (2020) and CROSS DORIS (2019).
In 2015, Lucas represented Britain at the 56th Venice Biennale with I SCREAM DADDIO, displayed in the British Pavilion.
Featuring monumental bronzes such as Maradona and a suite of cast figures arranged with domestic furniture, the presentation subverted art-historical conventions of femininity while amplifying the absurdities of gendered representation.
The Tit Cat figures—constructed from tied-off tights—encapsulated her ability to transform humble materials into works of startling humour and formal intricacy.
Tate Britain’s 2023–24 retrospective Happy Gas offered the most comprehensive overview of Lucas’s four-decade career to date.
Curated by the artist herself, the exhibition gathered more than seventy-five works across sculpture, photography, and installation, emphasising the recurring role of furniture as sculptural and conceptual anchor.
Sarah Lucas She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, 2023 Bronze, paint, lacquer, stainless steel and cement 86.3 x 71.6 x 185.7 cm 34 x 28 1/4 x 73 1/8 inches Sadie Coles HQ
A dedicated gallery showcased sixteen newly completed works, underscoring Lucas’s ongoing vitality and capacity for reinvention.
The retrospective affirmed Lucas’s standing as one of Britain’s most significant contemporary artists, deserving of the institutional and scholarly attention often afforded to her male counterparts.
