Artist Birthday: Sarah Lucas(born 1962 Britain)

Sarah Lucas is an English artist. She is part of the generation of the Young British Artists movement who emerged in 1988. Her works frequently employ visual puns and risqué humor by incorporating photography, sculpture, collage and found objects.
 

Artist Birthday for 23 October: Sarah Lucas (born 1962 Britain)

Sarah Lucas, Geezer, 2002, oil, cut-and-pasted paper, pencil on wood, 81 x 74.9 cm  The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2026 Sarah Lucas (MOMA-P1808)

In works like Geezer, Sarah Lucas uses collage to examine a wide range of topics from the objectification of women in media to the tenuous nature of celebrity. This piece is part of a body of work focused on Charlie George (born 1950), a London soccer player who gained fame playing for the Arsenal team and who grew up in the same working-class neighborhood as Lucas.

 This “portrait” of George — modeled on a July 1971 photograph of the player after a game — is created from cut-up bits of advertising. To Lucas, George’s soccer stardom represents the larger issues of aspiration and achievement and how achievement often leads to being used as a commodity to sell commercial products.
 
Lucas carefully arranges the repeated references to money and “bonanza” in Geezer, a reminder of the cost of success. In the end, Geezer is an indictment of how the British middle class lives vicariously through famous sports figures, aspiring to instant wealth, and falling in line with a consumer-driven, commercialized society.

Background 

The small steps towards modernism that British art took in the 1930s were largely halted with the advent of World War II (1939–1945). As the country was rebuilding after the war, austerity programs — including food rationing — lasted until the early 1950s. After more than ten years of privation, Britain realized a period of prosperity that created a new market for consumer goods, particularly commercial products from the United States.

A group of young British artists and architects formed the Independent Group in 1952. These artists were interested in how contemporary British art could reflect popular modern culture. Ironically, these artists built the foundation for what would become Pop Art long before American artists explored the phenomenon. The term “Pop Art” was first used by a British critic in 1958. Britain experienced another long dry spell in modernism while American movements that rebelled against Abstract Expressionism dominated the art world in the 1960s and 70s.

In the 1980s and 90s, British art was revitalized by a new generation of artists who initiated a series of exciting Postmodernist movements. One group that emerged at this time was the Young British Artists (YBA). Other than their age and nationality, YBA artists shared no common style or philosophy, and they ranged from painters and sculptors to photographers and installation artists. Another term for their work was “Britart.”

Sarah Lucas was born in a housing project in north London. After dropping out of school at 16, she later returned to study art at the Working Men’s College, London College of Printmaking, and finally graduated from the Goldsmiths’ College in 1987. Although the YBA initially exhibited only work by men, Lucas was soon exhibiting with them in group shows.

Lucas’s work heralded a new chapter in British art in the 1990s, characterized by expressions of raw anger and frustration with aspects of British culture — expressions that were taboo in previous decades. She often used the tabloid press as a springboard for her work, exploring such themes as male objectification of women, the subject of women’s liberation, and the misogyny that is part of everyday life.

Correlations to Davis Programs: Explorations in Art 1E, lesson 4.23; The Visual Experience 4E, lesson 8.5; Experience Art, lesson 3.3; Experience Painting, Chapter 6 Collage and Oils