She wasn’t even sure what art was for. She said the issue bothered her quite a bit. Also, the male Y.B.A.s were getting most of the attention. “I was quite reconciled to people not being so interested in me, but that freed me up,” she said. “I could experiment with materials, only pleasing myself.” She came to realize, she added, that “I could really have a lot of fun, humor, between me and me.”

By 1991, Ms. Lucas was making big collages from the most offensive Sport spreads. (An example, “Fat, Forty and Flabulous,” is in the retrospective.) Reading the feminist Andrea Dworkin helped her “see the extent to which everything is stacked against women,” she said. Dworkin also wrote about exploitive tabloid images, which encouraged Ms. Lucas to think she “could mobilize this hateful stuff to my own purpose,” she added. Part of that purpose was to explore an unsettling ambiguity: Are such images titillating, offensive, tragic or some combination thereof? Ms. Lucas feels that the tabloid spreads symbolize the position of all women, not just those in the images. And more: “You can identify with men as much as women,” she said. “They coexist.”

Since then, Ms. Lucas’s art has specialized in rudeness — although unvarnished honesty with a moral undertone may be more accurate. The phallus — whose depiction in Western art has been one of the most persistent taboos since the end of the Classical era — is a ubiquitous form in her work. (You might think that she wants to equal the attention male artists have lavished upon female breasts throughout history.) Intercourse is frequently intimated, and a tender sarcasm is the prevailing tone. Titles can include profanities and other slang learned on the streets of Islington, the London borough where she grew up. Her materials are cheap and familiar: old furniture, toilets, cinder blocks, underwear, cans of Spam and the stuffed pantyhose. Cars, traditionally a male obsession, also figure in: variously crushed, bisected, burned or carefully collaged with a layer of cigarettes, as are other objects. Fruits and vegetables, kebabs and whole raw chickens do double service, portraying erotic body parts.