Sarah Lucas Unveils VENUS VICTORIA at the New Museum’s Bowery Plaza

The British artist Sarah Lucas new public sculpture launches the New Museum’s outdoor commission series, bringing her unruly Bunny figure to a washing machine on the Bowery.

The New Museum has unveiled VENUS VICTORIA, a new public sculpture by Sarah Lucas, inaugurating the museum’s outdoor plaza at the junction of Bowery and Prince Street. The plaza forms part of the New Museum’s OMA-designed building expansion, creating a new civic threshold for contemporary art in downtown Manhattan.

Lucas, born in London in 1962, was chosen as the first artist to make work for the site by an all-artist jury comprising Teresita Fernández, Joan Jonas, Julie Mehretu, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith. Her commission opens today, 12 May 2026, and will remain on view for two years. She is the first of five artists to be selected over the next decade by a rotating jury of women artists for a commission series dedicated to the production and presentation of public sculpture by women.

Long regarded as one of Britain’s most incisive contemporary artists, Lucas has built a practice that moves across sculpture, photography and installation with a sharp comic intelligence. Her materials are often bluntly familiar: furniture, food, tabloid newspapers, tights, toilets and cigarettes. In her hands, these readymade objects become bodies, jokes, insults and monuments to appetite, absurdity and power.

The body remains Lucas’s central territory. VENUS VICTORIA grows out of her ongoing Bunny series, begun in 1997, in which biomorphic figures evoke reclining female nudes strapped, slumped or folded across chairs and other domestic structures. Here, Lucas recasts the language of public statuary with characteristic irreverence. Rather than standing in bronze solemnity above the city, the figure sits atop a giant washing machine, presiding over the Bowery’s traffic, pedestrians and appliance shops with a gleeful refusal of decorum.

The sculpture also turns the plaza into a stage for Lucas’s long-running argument with art history. Monumental public sculpture has often been used to commemorate military, political and civic authority, usually through heroic male figures. Lucas answers that tradition with a body that is comic, sexual, ungainly and unashamedly present. On the Bowery, VENUS VICTORIA reads as both provocation and streetwise apparition, a domestic goddess rerouted through punk wit and feminist mischief.

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Lucas’s commission follows her 2018 New Museum solo exhibition Au Naturel, which later travelled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2019. She first came to prominence in the 1990s with solo exhibitions including Penis Nailed to a Board at City Racing, London, and The Whole Joke on Kingly Street, London, both in 1992. Further presentations followed at MoMA, New York, in 1993; Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, in 1996; the Freud Museum, London, in 2000; and In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, with Angus Fairhurst and Damien Hirst, at Tate Britain in 2004.

Her wider exhibition history includes a 2005 touring retrospective at Kunsthalle Zürich, Kunstverein Hamburg and Tate Liverpool, as well as major solo presentations such as Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas at Tate Britain in 2023; Project 1: Sarah Lucas at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, in 2021; Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, in 2019; Sarah Lucas: Good Muse at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, in 2017; POWER IN WOMAN at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, in 2016, later travelling to Humber Street Gallery, Hull; and I SCREAM DADDIO at the British Pavilion for the 56th Venice International Art Biennale in 2015.

Sarah Lucas: VENUS VICTORIA is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Madeline Weisburg, Senior Assistant Curator.

©2026 Sarah Lucas, New Museum

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