“Well-behaved women seldom make history,” asserted historian, Harvard professor, and Pulitzer Prize winner Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in the 1970s about why women who act in unexpected ways are often remembered, while more conventional women fade into the background. Sarah Lucas is one misbehaving woman if there ever was one. Unashamed and unapologetic, her retrospective exhibition at the Hammer Museum reveals a mid-career artist in full force.

Lucas injects a female sensibility in her references to contemporary art history. Throughout each evolution of her work, from the early 1990s YBA pieces to her most current efforts, she creates new visual strategies that break with conventional behavior. Lucas is a feminist who has never looked back. Given millenniums of patriarchal dominance, the issue of women speaking out is necessarily that of their speaking out of turn. And speak out she does, at every junction in her work, with tremendous humor, British working-class grit, honesty and terrific craft.

Sarah Lucas, Edith, 1994, ©Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

There are numerous works that stand out, beginning with the signature piece Au Naturel. Composed of a soiled mattress, two melons, tomatoes, a cucumber, and a bucket, the remnants of a night of gritty coupling has never been so economically portrayed. The title of her first show, Penis Nailed To A Board, was a sign of the “what the fuck is this?” reaction she can still generate. Her self-portraits from Eating a Banana (1990) to the Red Sky Blue (2018) serve as larger social critiques as well as deeply personal statements. In considering the genre of artist self-portraits, hers are a major revelation. They are as revealing as those done by any artist in recent memory and create a wonderful, eclectic body of work.

Lucas has filled the Hammer’s galleries with sculptural projects like Bunny Gets Snookered: stockings stuffed into humanoid forms, thrown over chairs, legs spread wide, vulnerable and violated with everything showing. Adjacent galleries are installed with plaster and wire variations of erect cocks and balls. Throughout the galleries male genitalia are ubiquitous, decorating wallpaper, floating in pictures of soup. Lucas gleefully transforms cocks into a common fetish object in much the way that women with unreal, giant breasts are dehumanized in her British tabloid canvases like Seven-Up from the 1990s. Everyone gets equal time as Lucas’ work upends notions of gender and sexuality.

There are over 130 works in all: the life-size Crucifix covered in cigarettes, the Muse torsos and numerous videos; in total, a body of work with multiple art references that reach far deeper than surface brio. Lucas’ retrospective has been linked to the #metoo and environmental movements, but I feel this would miss the point that she has always been her own person and a singular artist. If her work syncs up with social and political agendas, it is serendipitous. She has been misbehaving from day one.