The biggest exhibition ever devoted to the decades-spanning career of provocative British artist Tracey Emin opened yesterday at London’s Tate Modern, celebrating her ability to transform “life’s trauma” into visceral art.
One of the best-known contemporary artists in the world, Emin, 62, nearly died in 2020 due to an aggressive cancer and has since undergone multiple major surgeries to treat the disease. Those harrowing years have heavily influenced the showcase, “Tracey Emin: A Second Life,” which runs at the famous London gallery until Aug. 31.
“[It] looks at Tracey’s whole career from the perspective of the second life that she is now living — a life that is very different,” said Tate director Maria Balshaw, who cocurated the exhibition.
Photo: EPA
Emin’s ability to use “the female body to explore passion, pain and healing” would be on full display in the approximately 100 works included, some showing publicly for the first time, the Tate Modern said.
Emin — who hails from a working-class background in Margate, England, and left school at 13 — called the showcase “the biggest moment of my career.”
“I keep telling myself it doesn’t matter how I look, it’s just so good I didn’t die, that I’m here to witness it, enjoy it,” she said.
The retrospective takes visitors, piece by piece, through the highs and lows that have shaped Emin’s life and remarkable career — from sexual violence in her teens to abortions and illness in later life.
“She is known internationally for her unapologetic, fearless use of everything from her personal experience, from life’s trauma to love to heartbreak, as the very raw material of art,” cocurator Alvin Li said.
Photographs hanging along a gallery corridor show her body after the myriad operations she has undergone to remove, among other things, her bladder, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries and urethra.
Some picture the urostomy bag Emin wears daily.
Photos on the opposite wall, dating back to 2001, are jarring, depicting her healthier body from that period.
Meanwhile, the 1995 short film Why I Never Became a Dancer provides a further contrast, capturing her dancing joyfully.
The film was made in response to “a vile and misogynistic experience that she had, being sex-shamed and taunted in Margate when she was a teenager,” Balshaw said.
A leading figure in the provocative late 1980s and 1990s Young British Artists movement alongside figures such as Damien Hirst and Chris Ofili, the exhibition reveals the full range of mediums Emin has used.
They include everything from embroidery on gigantic blankets and neon creations to sculptures and installations.
Her best-known work, My Bed — an unmade bed surrounded by intimate debris including empty vodka bottles, cigarette packets and condoms, which caused a sensation when it was unveiled in 1998 — takes center stage at the Tate Modern.
Despite her troubled upbringing, Emin returned to live there after her mother’s death in 2016 and while she was sick herself, beginning what she has called her “second life.”
Emin, who was honored by King Charles III with a damehood last year, now focuses on large-scale paintings, has given up smoking and alcohol, and devotes her time to mentoring and financially supporting young artists.
Her recent canvases have a more spiritual, poetic dimension, spotlighting how art could prove regenerative for its practitioners, although the works also remain dark in tone.
“Tracey has always been fearless in engaging a lot of subjects from her personal experience, such as rape, abortion,” Li said. “She received criticism for it back then when she was doing it, but from the standpoint of today, we can see how progressive Tracey has been in pushing contemporary art and engaging with these subjects.”
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