“PROJECT 1: Sarah Lucas” is surely the National Gallery of Australia’s most in-your-face exhibition in years, from one of Britain’s most in-your-face artists.

Sadly, because of covid, she can’t be here to enjoy the fun as visitors wander among phalluses and very strange contortions of the female and male body combined.

Defying conventions of classical balance, Lucas combined the ancient aesthetic of bronze with its brilliant golden patina and sometimes something darker, with the soft sculptures she’s best known for to create an extraordinary suite of three-dimensional artworks.

The exhibition is staged quite theatrically, with Lucas’ notorious black and white single portrait of herself eating a banana from 1990 now seen as wallpaper, dominating the sculptural installations.

“The banana joke is pretty clear,” the NGA’s curator of projects, Peter Johnson, says explaining that though it was part of her rise to fame, she had later unearthed the contact sheet from those images and found them so sharp, snapped as they were in the pre-digital era, that they could be adapted into a wallpaper display of more than seven metres high from floor to ceiling.

Johnson has no doubt that Lucas is one of the most important artists of the past 30 years. He’s also pretty sure that it’s the first significant show of her work in Australia – a coup for the gallery – and declares himself “incredibly excited”.

“It looks like gold, doesn’t it?” he says enthusiastically of the bronze used in the NGA’s recently-acquired work, “TITTIPUSSIDAD” explaining that it takes a scouring pad to keep them looking like that and indicating a nearby sculpture in which the patina has been allowed to age naturally.

The show is an obvious adjunct to the “Know My Name Part II” exhibition in the adjoining galleries, and the decision to stage Lucas’s work is part of the gallery’s push to increase the representation of women artists.

“Project 1: Sarah Lucas” so named because it’s the first of the National Gallery’s “Project Series”, features two recent sculpture series, including new works from the “Bunny” series she’s been making since 1997 in which she leads the British artists who look irreverently and talk about sexuality.

Johnson alerts me to a 1997 prototype called “Bunny Gets Snookered,” in which the compliant blue-clad female figure sits on a mid-century armchair on top of a snooker table.

When it comes to unflattering diminutives for women, Australians might be more familiar with the idea of women as chicks, not bunnies, but as Johnson points out, Lucas had her eyes very firmly on Hugh Hefner’s sexy “Playboy” Bunnies, who were always available but, though appearing to be living the high life, sadly abused.

“The works are funny, this is always a joke or a punch to make difficult things easy to talk about,” Johnson says, and indeed Lucas has said: “‘When humour happens, things get good. Less depressing. It’s a kind of magic”.

Apart from the banana photograph, Lucas has been best-known since the 1990s for her soft, female-like sculptures, often filled with wool, possibly undermining the materiality of what Johnson calls “the sculpture-in-the- town-square” through the soft medium.

In her newest work, Lucas has set up an intellectual-visual analysis of the question, “where does power sit?” as she confronts and ridicules the stereotype, “soft for girls, hard for boys”. The title of one sculpture is “DICK ‘EAD” and the meaning is very clear.

The sculptures on show at the NGA are solid, hard and blush-making as she examines, though androgynous or even hermaphroditic sculptures, the way bodies works are enjoyed or exploited.

There’s humour in the way she takes a swipe at masculine superiority, yet there is sadness, too, as she seems to be exploring the pain threshold that women experience, especially when it comes to the shoes they wear.

In fact, the remarkable exhibition could be subtitled not “Know My Name” but “Know my Shoes”.

“Project 1: Sarah Lucas”, National Gallery of Australia, until February 13. Free entry.