Tracey Emin: Sex and Solitude

Provocative yet deeply personal, Emin’s carnal, soul-bearing mixed-media works combine corporeal and emotional pain.

The art of YBA mainstay Tracey Emin (born 1963) is an art of denunciation: one that utilizes the events of her life as a source of inspiration for her works in painting, neon sculpture, drawing, video, installation, photography, embroidery and sculpture. Vulnerability, crudity and physicality are all present in her works such as My Bed or her recent Lovers Grave paintings, creating an oeuvre in which desire and suffering go hand in hand. Emin candidly reveals her hopes and humiliations with an immediacy and a sexually provocative attitude that takes cues from artists such as Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch. Through a selection of historic and more recent works from public and private collections around the world, this eponymous catalog presents 30 years of Emin’s work, whose controversial and lacerating aesthetics has strongly influenced the image of the female body in contemporary art.