The Whitechapel Gallery presents the first major solo exhibition in London of renowned artist Sarah Lucas. Bringing together over two decades of sculpture, installation and photography, Situation explores Lucas’s remarkable career and assesses the vital role she plays in British art.

Since the late 1980s, Lucas has created sculptures and installations that focus on the body. Drawing upon everyday materials such as cigarettes, tights, furniture and vegetables, she probes representations of gender, sexuality and national identity. Her work alludes to historic movements such as Pop Art and Arte Povera while addressing the universal concerns of nature and mortality.

Situation features Lucas’s iconic works which use inanimate objects to take the shape of bodies, including Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992) and Spinster (2000). Also shown are early sculptures such as Still Life (1992), Where does it all end? (1994) and Get Hold of This (1994) as well as important works from the last decade including Unknown Soldier (2003), Mary (2004), The King (2008) and Jubilee (2012).

In recent years Lucas’s work combines fragments of the body with forms and materials found in nature. The exhibition includes new works called Nuds (2009 – present); stuffed tights are moulded into sculptures suggestive of embracing bodies, their intertwined forms offset by plinths of concrete breeze blocks. Her Loungers (2011) series will also be shown featuring suspended plastic garden chairs, combined with material limbs and buckets.

Responding to the architecture of the Whitechapel Gallery, Sarah Lucas will create an installation which reconsiders the affinities and dialogues between earlier works and new sculptures created for the exhibition. The show expands on Lucas’ year-long project Situation in which she constructed a series of sculptural installations in a former office building.