Art in the Parks

Description:

Perceval is a life-sized horse and cart, a replica of the sort of china ornament that have had pride of place on many British mantelpieces. Scaled up, the horse is majestic in his power but offers an unthreatening sense of stolid comfort in his benign reliability. In the proudly fashioned cart are two concrete cast squashes, outsize and off-scale, fertility symbols implicating a competitive rural contest to rival the ritual of the maypole. These giant vegetables are cast in cement, one of Lucas’s favored materials, and take the replication of the horse and cart knick-knack away from kitsch, the crudeness of this signature Lucas gesture thrown into sharper relief by the high finish of the bronze sculpture.

Perceval reflects a fascination for Englishness evident in much of Lucas’s work. The title is borrowed from the name of one of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. Raised in a forest by his mother, the virtuous and noble Perceval meets the knights as they pass and goes off the join them, later becoming involved in the quest for the Holy Grail. The story has been reworked in various contemporary versions, notably Eliot’s The Wasteland and Wagner’s opera Parsifal, in which version the eponymous hero is the one to recover the spear used to pierce Christ during his crucifixion.

Sarah Lucas is one of the most significant contemporary women artists working in London today. She is among the group of artists who are credited with being a catalyst for the Young British Artist (YBA) movement, which has brought to light the likes of artists including Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Tracey Emin, and others. Her work has been exhibited in numerous museums, including Tate Modern in London, Kunsthalle Zurich, Kunstverein Hamburg, and others.

This installation is a project of the Public Art Fund.