Sarah Lucas unveils VENUS VICTORIA at New Museum plaza

From the AD HOC NEWS Art Desk » Auction & Market Desk - The editors cover exhibitions, auctions, collections, prizes and artistic positions. Published: August 25, 2026 · Last checked: August 25, 2026, 10:05 AM

Sarah Lucas opens a new chapter in her public sculpture practice with the New Museum commission VENUS VICTORIA on the Bowery plaza in New York. According to a detailed New Museum announcement dated May 12, 2026, the work inaugurated the institution’s new outdoor public space at the corner of Bowery and Prince Street and will remain on view for two years as the first commission in a planned series of women artists’ projects. New Museum press release

Sarah Lucas on the Bowery plaza

The New Museum describes VENUS VICTORIA as a new sculpture commission that celebrates women claiming space in public life, installed on the museum’s expanded plaza at the terminus of Bowery and Prince Street in lower Manhattan. The project is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, together with senior assistant curator Madeline Weisburg, and is framed as the inaugural work in a rotation of plaza commissions by women artists. Exhibition page at New Museum

Listed as a current exhibition on the New Museum’s program overview, Plaza: Sarah Lucas—VENUS VICTORIA appears alongside the show New Humans: Memories of the Future and the facade work by Tschabalala Self, anchoring Lucas within a broader institutional push toward public-facing commissions. The work is presented as ongoing from May 12, 2026, underlining its role as a long-duration intervention in the streetscape rather than a short-term event. New Museum exhibitions overview

Market resonance beyond the plaza

While the plaza commission is a public work accessible free of charge, Sarah Lucas’s sculptures and photographs remain present on the secondary market in the low to mid six-figure band, with works such as Nude No. 2 (1999) now also entering public collections through acquisition channels. The Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire announced on July 27, 2026, that it had acquired this 1999 piece via the Contemporary Art Society’s Special Partnership with the Henry Moore Foundation, with support from Cathy Wills and the artist herself, indicating institutional demand that operates alongside auction results. Hepworth Wakefield news

The Hepworth notes that Nude No. 2 is currently displayed until March 2027 in the exhibition Rhythm, Dance and Everything: The Body and Performance from Hepworth to Now, where it appears in dialogue with works such as Tau Lewis’s Lilith (2024). The acquisition through a structured partnership rather than a single headline-grabbing auction underlines how Lucas’s market position is today closely intertwined with museum strategies and philanthropic support rather than speculative spikes alone.

The work core of Sarah Lucas

Since the late 1980s, Sarah Lucas has developed a sculptural and photographic language that uses everyday materials such as chairs, stockings, cigarettes, furniture and cast concrete to stage the body as a site of humor and aggression. Her early assemblages with fried eggs, melons and stuffed tights set the tone for later series of anthropomorphic furniture, in which objects lean, slump and splay in ways that echo and parody gendered postures. In VENUS VICTORIA, this strategy moves into the register of monumental public sculpture, addressing the street as an audience rather than the white cube alone.

Where the artist stands now

By all accounts, Sarah Lucas currently holds a dual position as both a canonical figure of the 1990s Young British Artists generation and a still-active sculptor whose work, from plaza commissions like VENUS VICTORIA in New York to acquisitions such as Nude No. 2 at the Hepworth Wakefield, continues to be integrated into public space and institutional narratives.

This article was produced with a.i. support and editorially reviewed. All statements without guarantee; auction results, exhibition dates and awards may change at short notice.