New Museum has unveiled a major new public sculpture by Sarah Lucas, marking the first commission created for the institution’s new outdoor plaza as part of its OMA-designed expansion on the Bowery.
Titled VENUS VICTORIA, the large-scale sculpture opened on 12th May 2026 and will remain on view for the next two years. Positioned at the intersection of Bowery and Prince Street, the work inaugurates a new long-term commission series dedicated to supporting public sculpture by women artists.
Lucas was selected by an all-artist jury comprising Teresita Fernández, Joan Jonas, Julie Mehretu, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith. She is the first of five artists who will be commissioned over the next decade through the initiative.
Known for her irreverent and often confrontational approach to sculpture, photography and installation, Lucas has built a career using everyday materials — including furniture, cigarettes, tights, toilets and food — to explore sexuality, gender, the body and power structures through humour and distortion.
VENUS VICTORIA extends Lucas’s long-running Bunny series (1997–present), in which stuffed tights and biomorphic forms evoke reclining female bodies draped across chairs and domestic objects. Here, Lucas transforms the trope of the monumental public statue by placing a mischievous reclining figure atop a giant washing machine.
Perched above the activity of the Bowery — surrounded by pedestrians, traffic and appliance stores — the sculpture playfully subverts traditional public monuments, which have historically celebrated male political or military figures.
The commission follows Lucas’s acclaimed 2018 New Museum exhibition Au Naturel, which later travelled to the Hammer Museum in 2019.
Lucas first emerged as part of the generation of British artists who rose to prominence in the early 1990s, with early solo exhibitions including Penis Nailed to a Board at City Racing, London, and The Whole Joke on Kingly Street, London. Her work has since been exhibited internationally at institutions including Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain, the Venice Biennale and the Freud Museum.
Recent major exhibitions include Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas at Tate Britain (2023), Project 1: Sarah Lucas at the National Gallery of Australia (2021), and I SCREAM DADDIO, representing Britain at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.
Sarah Lucas: VENUS VICTORIA is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Madeline Weisburg, Senior Assistant Curator.
All Images: Sarah Lucas, VENUS VICTORIA, 2026. Installation view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Thomas Barrett
About
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street, to the inauguration of its SANAA-designed flagship building in 2007, to the OMA-designed expansion of its
home on the Bowery in 2026, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas. @newmuseum
