She may be one of Britain’s most highly-rated artists and a key member of the YBA generation. Damien Hirst may describe her as “the greatest artist I know”, but astonishingly Sarah Lucas’s current exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery is her first major solo show in this country.

While former classmate Hirst and fellow Bad Girl Tracey Emin - with whom she ran an infamous shop in Bethnal Green Road in 1993 - have now become single-name brands,  Lucas has always ducked beneath the celebrity radar. A few years ago she even turned down a nomination for the Turner Prize. Yet while many of her higher-profile compadres have lapsed into lazy artistic retreads, this long-overdue survey confirms that Lucas has lost none of her audacity, her  inventiveness and her ability to unsettle and provoke.

For while the artist may be reticent, her bawdy, bodily art is anything but. Lucas’s first show in 1990 was memorably entitled "Penis Nailed to a Board" and from the earliest piece in the Whitechapel show - a wall-sized blow-up of a 1989 collage depicting penis tips bobbing against a gelatinous background of vegetable soup, to this year’s  gleaming cast bronze "Nuds" series, in which breasts, penises, buttocks and limbs mix, morph and merge, Lucas continues to explore and revel in the human body in all its sexy, leaky, ridiculous, revolting, gorgeous, clothed and naked glory.

No one is more adept at putting everyday materials together to become something completely different whilst still being absolutely themselves; whether her now-iconic female nude remade as "Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab" on a battered tabletop, the pair of hams stuffed into knickers and slumped on a stained mattress, or the kapok-stuffed tights twisted to become an abject bunny girl, slumped on a cheap chair.

But the deliberate directness, the throat-grabbing crudity of her art is only part of the story. Lucas’s art plays both with, and off, sexism and misogyny and wrong-foots any easy reading. It is both funny and deadly serious. The only face in this bodily array is the artist’s own and in all her photographic self portraits she is fiercely in control.

Lucas is also well aware of art history, deftly handling contemporary sanitary ware, trashy fast food and cheap hosiery to harness the impact of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, Surrealist Rene Magritte’s genital-faced woman or Louise Bourgeois’ copulating soft sculptures into a highly individual language that speaks of an immediate here and now. Hers is an art of the pun, the multiple meaning, the quick repartee, it relates to your body but it also reverberates in your mind.

Sarah Lucas, SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble, October 2 – December 15, 2013 at Whitechapel Gallery.

Supported by Louis Vuitton