Born: London, 1962

Click here for a 3D panorama of Life's a Drag Organs 1998

Sarah Lucas is best known for a series of lurid, humorous sculptures, which combine the spirit of Duchamp's readymades with a punk sensibility. Smoking has been a recurring theme in her work. Most recently she has focused in particular on the use of the unlit cigarette as a decorative element.

Her sculpture Life's a Drag Organs, plays on the multiple meanings of drag - a puff of a cigarette, a bore, a road race. It comprises two burnt-out cars decorated with hundreds of unlit Marlboro Reds. Painstakingly arranged on the front seats or bonnets of the cars, the cigarettes are a playful jest towards an audience suspicious of contemporary art. However, seen in conjunction with the title of the work, the distressed cars become tarred lungs, contaminated by inhaled smoke. Cigarettes and cars are both sold as glamorous icons of our culture, holding out the promise of pleasure and escape. Here the burnt-out cars, like pieces of forensic evidence, present a darker vision of pollution and death.