A giant, surreal sculpture by British artist Sarah Lucas now presides over the corner of Bowery and Prince Street outside the New Museum. Titled VENUS VICTORIA, the work is a towering, biomorphic reclining female form in pink with yellow high heels, cheekily perched atop an oversized washing machine that reads like a subversive public monument. The piece landed on the sidewalk this week and immediately rewrote the scale and tone of the Bowery streetscape.
The installation is the inaugural commission for the New Museum’s new public plaza, part of the museum’s expanded, OMA-designed campus, according to New Museum. The $400,000 award, provided by the William “Beau” Wrigley Jr. Foundation, covers production and installation and will support subsequent commissions over the next decade. The selection jury included Teresita Fernández, Joan Jonas, Julie Mehretu, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith, the museum said.
From the sidewalk the sculpture reads like a mashup of classical nude and sly wink: a bulbous, playful figure in bright colors resting on a giant cast-concrete washer, an image that lampoons heroic monuments while keeping Lucas’s familiar domestic materials in play. The design evolved from Lucas’s long-running "Bunny" series of biomorphic forms and stuffed tights, and reporters say the work is meant to preside over the Bowery’s mix of traffic, pedestrians and appliance stores. Coverage of the unveiling appeared in Time Out.
How It Fits The New Museum Expansion
The sculpture sits at the terminus of the new outdoor plaza created as part of the museum’s expansion designed by OMA, which doubled the institution’s gallery space and reoriented the building toward the street, according to The Architect's Newspaper. On the Bowery, Lucas’s VENUS VICTORIA now shares a visual program with other commissions: the museum previously installed Tschabalala Self’s large facade piece, as reported in giant Bowery hug. Together the works aim to make the New Museum’s frontage a kind of open-air gallery rather than a single civic monument.
Commission And Gender Equity
The project launches a long-term initiative to commission women artists in public sculpture, supported by the Wrigley award and administered by the museum, which said the jury "selected Sarah Lucas’s proposal for its exuberance, vitality, and irreverence." The New Museum framed VENUS VICTORIA as an “unmonumental” monument celebrating women claiming space in public life, language drawn from the press materials. The selection underscores a broader institutional effort to rebalance the gendered history of public statuary.
What To Know Before You Go
VENUS VICTORIA will be on view in the plaza for roughly two years, so pedestrians can catch it during multiple seasons of Bowery life, according to Gladstone Gallery. The commission is on public view at the corner of Bowery and Prince Street near the museum entrance at 235 Bowery, per listings and event pages. For photographers and visitors, the scale and color make it instantly image-friendly, but Lucas’s work also intends to provoke a conversation about what kinds of bodies and stories are memorialized in public.
The arrival of VENUS VICTORIA adds another theatrical note to a Bowery streetscape long accustomed to reinventing itself, and critics and passersby alike will be watching how the piece settles into neighborhood life. As The Art Newspaper observed, Lucas pairs a classic art-historical gesture with street-level absurdity, exactly the sort of public work likely to keep people talking.
