Tracey Emin’s art is one of disclosure, using her life events as inspiration for works ranging from painting, drawing, video and installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture. Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in candid and, at times, excoriating work that is frequently both tragic and humorous.
Emin’s work has an immediacy and often sexually provocative attitude that firmly locates her oeuvre within the tradition of feminist discourse. By re-appropriating conventional handicraft techniques – or ‘women’s work’ – for radical intentions, Emin’s work resonates with the feminist tenets of the ‘personal as political’. In Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With, Emin used the process of appliqué to inscribe the names of lovers, friends and family within a small tent, into which the viewer had to crawl inside, becoming both voyeur and confidante. Her interest in the work of Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele particularly inform Emin’s paintings, monoprints and drawings, which explore complex personal states and ideas of self-representation through manifestly expressionist styles and themes.
Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963, and studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. She has exhibited extensively internationally, including solo and group exhibitions in Holland, Germany, Japan, Australia and America. Most recently, Emin’s work has been shown in the following solo exhibitions: The Distance of Your Heart, Amanda Love Art, Sydney,(2018), The Memory of Your Touch, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2017), Surrounded by You, Château La Coste, Aix-En-Provence, France (2017), I cried because I love you, Lehmann Maupin and White Cube, Hong Kong (2016), Angel without You, Miami MoCA, Miami (2013) and a major survey exhibition Love Is What You Want, Hayward Gallery, London (2011). She has also entered her work into a series of acclaimed dialogues with the work of past masters she admires, most notably: Tracey Emin, My Bed / JMW Turner, Turner Contemporary, Margate (2017), In Focus: Tracey Emin and William Blake, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2016), Tracey Emin and Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, London (2015), Where I Want to Go, with Egon Schiele, The Leopold Museum, Vienna (2015). Tracey Emin represented the UK at the Venice Biennale in 2007 with the exhibition Borrowed Light, and was elected to the Royal Academy in the same year. In 2011, she was appointed Professor of Drawing at The Royal College of Art, London, and in 2012 Queen Elizabeth II appointed her Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts.
