Bawdy Lucas hits the height of her powers

For her huge new Tate Britain show, Sarah Lucas has swapped Nineties nostalgia for darkly amusing swagger, says Ben Luke

- Ben Luke

ONE of the most enduring of the Young British Artists, Sarah Lucas, now 60, could have rested on her laurels. For her big Tate Britain show, she could have delivered a greatest hits show, one that emphasised her role in the Nineties YBA scene alongside old friend and sometime collaborator Damien Hirst. Instead, with typical, wicked but thoughtful irreverence, Lucas has chosen not to stage a grand retrospective. Several of her brutally punning, abjectly sexual sculptures from the height of the YBA era are conspicuously absent: no Two Fried Eggs and Kebab (1992) the titular foodstuffs slapped on a humdrum table to form the most sardonic of reclining nudes - and no Au Naturel (1994), that soiled mattress that featured in the infamous Sensation show in 1997 at the Royal Academy, with sewn-in lewd objects - melons and a bucket for her, oranges and a cucumber for him. The Shop, the anarchic premises she and Tracey Emin ran on the Bethnal Green Road in 1993, goes unmentioned; no archival photographs, no ephemeral souvenirs.

But then Lucas never resorts to the obvious or the orthodox. She treats each exhibition as a work in itself, hoping to imbue everything she does with new meaning. At this fantastic new show at Tate Britain, she has opened out the exhibition spaces into four airy rooms, with what she sees as four (very loose) acts in this drama: early works, newer pieces, the pastoral and the apocalyptic. Wallpaper, often featuring photographic portraits of Lucas, overlooks the sculptures. In the thematic rooms, works from across her career are in productive dialogue; the newest are some of the best here, the older pieces have aged superbly.