Outside the New Museum‘s recently unveiled building, the flailing arms and large pink breasts of Sarah Lucas’s new public sculpture, “VENUS VICTORIA” (2026), tower over the endless flow of traffic on Lower Manhattan’s Bowery.
“Mom, why are they all standing there?” a toddler asked a woman hurriedly pushing a stroller near the artwork on Friday, May 15.
“They’re looking at the sculpture,” the woman replied, interrupted by another unsatisfied, tiny-voiced, “Why?”
“Because they think her titties are interesting,” she responded, laughing and whisking the child past the work.
The subversive feminine figure, perched angularly atop a dusty washing machine in bright yellow high heels, will spend the next two years at the New Museum’s triangular entrance plaza. Lucas and the museum unveiled the work on Tuesday, May 12, inaugurating a series of public commissions by women artists over the next decade.
Lucas told Hyperallergic in an email that she conceived of “VENUS VICTORIA” while developing her 2023 Tate Modern exhibition Happy Gas. At the time, she was creating a new body of sculptures for her series Bunnies (1997–ongoing), featuring knotted pantyhose figures seated on chairs.
The artist said she chose to adapt this particular figure from Bunnies to monumental form for its “exuberance, optimism, and general good feeling,” qualities that struck her as “what we always need a bit more of, and a good way to start the new era of the New Museum.”
On Wednesday and Friday afternoons, museum visitors and passersby alike stopped to take photos of the sculpture, and on both afternoons, men seemed more likely to pull out their phones to snap an image.
New York-born and raised jewelry designer Phyllis Azar told Hyperallergic on Friday that she felt she had more questions than answers after viewing the sculpture.
” It’s a White woman on top of a washing machine with high heels,” Azar said. “She has this expression of: ‘Oh, what’s happening with me? I don’t know. I’m on this machine,’” Azar said.
Azar’s husband, sculptor Max Gyllenhaal, appreciated the work overall. “I like the super glossy look. It really makes it very sensuous, kind of sweaty,” he said.
A Canadian tourist visiting New York City to attend a graduation, who declined to provide his name, stopped to smoke a cigarette with his friend in front of the sculpture on Wednesday.
“The main thing I noticed was the washing machine,” he said. “[The top] looks like a blown-up balloon.”
When Hyperallergic shared the museum’s description of the work as “lampooning traditional — and typically male — monumental public statues of historic figures,” he said, “I would much rather see this than a statue of Columbus.”
The commission comes eight years after Lucas’s New Museum solo exhibition, Au Naturel (2018), a major survey that traced her career from her 1980s Young British Artists roots through her more recent figurative sculptural series.
Despite experiencing the normal nerves associated with seeing one’s own finished creation, Lucas said the unveiling of the final work brought her relief.
“It’s a bit Pop, I think, especially sitting the figure on a washing machine,” Lucas told Hyperallergic. “That seems to me to suit New York, and [it’s situated] on the street where a lot of people will get to see it who don’t necessarily take a big interest in art.”
