Anthea Hamilton made an impression last year, in the group exhibition “That Obscure Object of Desire” at Luxembourg & Dayan gallery, with a Plexiglas chair in the form of a woman’s spread legs. Here, the up-and-coming British artist has filled SculptureCenter’s cavernous hall and enclosed courtyard with, among other things, ceramic eating utensils, rice cakes made of glass, PVC-pipe sculptures of giant, stubbed-out cigarettes, bugle-beaded rubber panties and an 18-foot-tall, painted-foam sculpture of a man’s ass, based on Italian designer Gaetano Pesce’s 1972 proposal for an office-building entrance.
Hamilton’s apparent references include Eduardo Paolozzi and other icons of U.K. Pop Art, ’70s supergraphics, Adelle Lutz’s camouflage suits for David Byrne, Sarah Charlesworth and, possibly, the clothing designs of Andrea Zittel. The smartest thing the show does is to combine several decades’ worth of fetishistic design, from Allen Jones’s 1960s sculptures of women as furniture to 21st-century, Zen-themed
day spas. While somewhat overstuffed, the exhibition never loses sight of the overlap between art and avant-garde design and between sex and consumer obsessions.