Tits in Space

Sarah Lucas

  • Year 2000
  • Edition Unlimited edition
  • Material/Technique Tapetendruck
  • Dimensions Variable
  • Category Installation
  • Collection Sammlung Goetz, München

In her works the British artist Sarah Lucas explores the reversal of role attributions. Thereby she not only questions power structures, but also gender relations. 
In her objects, installations and photographs, the artist uses everyday items that she sexualizes through their staging. Cigarettes are a recurring motif in her early work and serve as a reference to a non-conformist lifestyle. 
Her wallpaper, humorously titled Tits in Space, was created in the year 2000. Sarah Lucas printed conical balls of filter cigarettes on a black background, reminiscent of female breasts. The pattern was created as part of a solo show at the Sadie Coles Gallery in London, where the artist employed the wallpaper as a background for the presentation of objects such as chairs, vacuum cleaners and garden gnomes, which were covered with a layer of filter cigarettes.

The same group of works also includes: Drag-On (2003).

Q & A with Sarah Lucas

How was the work Tits in Space created and why did you choose wallpaper as a medium?

I can’t remember why I made it. Presumably I thought wallpaper would help some situation or other. It’s helped a lot of situations since. Most recently, in its peachy version, in the recent survey exhibition Happy Gas at Tate Britain. 

What is the title of the work about?

When I saw them as a wallpaper design, they struck me as being like stars in space.

As in many of your works, you use cigarettes as a design element. What is their significance, also in relation to the depiction of women's breasts?

I’d been making tits, using balls and other roundish objects, to represent the bosoms of a figure I was making at the time. Female figures with, usually, a chair standing in for the body. They were, in a phrase I coined at the time, ‘idealised smoker’s chests’.

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