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‘Does art have a sex? And if so, what does it look like?’ With these questions Amna Malik opens her study of Sarah Lucas’s Au Naturel (1994), an assemblage of objects that suggest male and female body parts. Through much of Lucas’s work, and particularly in Au Naturel, ‘sex’ appears with no apparent morality attached – no implication of guilt, shame or embarrassment. The sardonic and irreverent nature of Lucas’s observations challenges assumptions about what kind of art women artists make. This, Malik proposes, is the significance of Lucas’s work for a later generation of female artists who no longer feel obliged to insist on questions of gender and sexual politics in their work.
