THE WORST OF 2004

THE BIZARRE AND EXPENSIVE ART

Memory man: Peter Doig 

Peter Doig's snowy and forested landscapes, owing much to his upbringing in Canada, have a dream-like and fictional quality, recalling scenes from Grimms' fairy tales or, some critics claim, stills from cult north American movies. In the past he's described them as flashbacks or memories, drifting images snatched from fading recollection and reinvented in a painted world. Often his use of colour has an hallucinatory feel. Doig was born in Edinburgh in 1959, but spent the years 1960-1979 in rural Ontario. The figures that populate his paintings and etchings are sometimes 'borrowed' from images that catch his eye in magazines or on record sleeves, or from photographs he organises in files like sketchbooks and then uses 'like a map, a way of giving me a foot into a kind of reality I want'. But even as they draw the viewer's eye and drag him into their unknowable story, Doig's people - often children - defer to the drama and vastness of the landscape they stand in, and of the painting itself. Flecked, uneven, stained, pimpled, dissolving into patterns, his use of paint has an instability and volatility akin to the dream state itself. In 2002, Doig and his family moved from London to Trinidad, and his work since reveals a trend towards Caribbean imagery and colours: aquamarines and warm oranges, gold, opalescent pink and yellow; tropical flowers and sunlit beaches; snowy, enchanted forests replaced by swampy woods, hot tarmac and scrub. By common consent, it's a grown-up move for a very grown-up painter.- By Alison Roberts

Rude girl: Sarah Lucas  

Photo: Sod You Gits by Sarah Lucas (1990).

Sarah Lucas exhibited one of her most famous works, Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, in 1992, in a shop in Soho. Every morning, she had to get up and buy a kebab, then fry the eggs, then arrange them carefully on a table. 'It seemed part of the installation,' she has said. 'It never crossed my mind that anyone would buy it.' Charles Saatchi, who did, has long been a Lucas fan and patron. So enormously successful has she become, the carefully posed eggs and melons, the fags and obscenely gesturing Þsts, the scowling self-portraits and titillating tabloids, have passed into YBA iconography as surely as Damien Hirst's cows and Tracey Emin's tent. Other artists hijack banal domestic objects for their own (often feminist) ends - Mona Hatoum's series of menacing kitchen appliances springs to mind - but Lucas, now 41, does it with more venom and energy, more dirty-mouthed humour, more gall. Much of the work quite obviously deals with old-fashioned stereotypes of gender and class. By appropriating the attitudes and accessories of blokedom - the tabloid pin-ups, the donkey jacket, the beer cans and fags - and then turning them into art, Lucas makes them funny or slightly sad or undermines them just by being female. Not that she's taking sides. 'If I look at the Sport I seem to be able to think it's a bit gruesome - more so on some days than others - and also it's quite funny,' she has told the critic Matthew Collings. 'I don't think I have a problem with having more than one view about it at once.'

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