{"id":304746,"date":"2026-02-27T11:07:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T11:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/304746\/"},"modified":"2026-02-27T11:07:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T11:07:11","slug":"tracey-emins-tate-modern-retrospective-shows-her-triumphs-and-limitations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/304746\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracey Emin\u2019s Tate Modern retrospective shows her triumphs \u2014 and limitations"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is nearly 30 years since the installation \u201cMy Bed\u201d failed to win the Turner Prize, catapulting its creator to a tabloid fame which shifted, slowly then decisively, from notoriety \u2014 the swearing, sexually aggressive provocateur \u2014 to public embrace for the national treasure Dame Tracey Emin. That journey, unique among British artists, makes Tate Modern\u2019s sensitive, tightly curated retrospective Tracey Emin: A Second Life so intently a social history that it fascinates quite beyond the realm of art.<\/p>\n

At its centre is \u201cMy Bed\u201d (1998) \u2014 Emin has made nothing as original or significant since. Today the surprise is that, as she says, \u201cit looks so sweet. It\u2019s so sad\u201d, and that it is a knockout sculpture. The crumpled sheets are as sensuously orchestrated as Manet\u2019s in \u201cOlympia\u201d. The geometric square bed versus the chaos of cigarette butts, condoms, tampons, vodka bottles, plays on minimalism, ready-mades, psychodrama, all at once.<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018The End of Love\u2019 (2024) by Tracey Emin \u00a9 Tracey Emin\/DACS<\/p>\n

\u201cMy Bed\u201d was initially read as promiscuous boasting. How wrong we were: it is an unforgettable self-portrait of depression. Following childhood neglect, abuse, rape at 13, and a recent break-up, Emin was suicidal at the time. <\/p>\n

Her work already teemed with personal relics, sanctifying a religion of self-exposure, the female body\u2019s martyrdom. Tate\u2019s opening rooms, 1990-93, display her medicine bottle and pills in \u201cMy Abortion\u201d, her passport and framed tooth (\u201cthe last dead thing to leave my body\u201d) in \u201cMy Future\u201d, the appliqu\u00e9 blanket named for her father\u2019s \u201cHotel International\u201d. In wonky letters, the latter summarises her biography: birth date 3-7-1963; her parents\u2019 romance (\u201cPam Cashin loved Envar Emin so much\u201d); KFC, the shop beneath the Margate council flat where she grew up with her single mother.<\/p>\n

Later comes another reliquary, gold fabric \u2014 \u201cthe last piece I had from my mum\u2019s curtains\u201d \u2014 in \u201cThe Last of the Gold\u201d (2002), an embroidered \u201cA-Z of abortion\u201d; the pathos is her closeness to her mother, whom she adored, and her own difficult decision not to become a mother herself. There is also the gaudy, garrulous blanket \u201cMad Tracey from Margate. Everyone\u2019s been there\u201d (1997), defining the persona of the ballsy victim, defiant yet self-pitying: \u201cLeave him, Trace\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009How it feels\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009Every time I pass Dunkin Donuts I think of you\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009And I said fuck off\u2009.\u2009. . \u201d <\/p>\n

\"A\u2018Mad Tracey from Margate. Everyone\u2019s been there\u2019 (1997) by Tracey Emin \u00a9 Tracey Emin\/DACS<\/p>\n

Emin\u2019s textiles connect to women\u2019s homespun, storytelling traditions; they also unfurl like political banners, at Tate to the incessant, strident soundtracks of two films: Emin booed offstage (\u201cSlag! Slag! Slag!\u201d) in \u201cWhy I never became a dancer\u201d (1995), and chronicling her botched abortion in \u201cHow It Feels\u201d (1996). She retells this in paint, a faceless, spindly figure outlined in blue, between her legs a thick crimson blot, spilling down the canvas: \u201cAnd so it felt like this\u201d (2018).<\/p>\n

That title could stand for her entire diaristic oeuvre: an outburst of romanticism, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, among the cold, conceptual Young British Artists. Emin wasn\u2019t the first woman artist to mine trauma (Louise Bourgeois is her idol), or to focus on reproductive rights \u2014 Paula Rego\u2019s abortion series appeared the same year as \u201cMy Bed\u201d. But, media-savvy and feisty, she spoke to and for a wider audience. <\/p>\n

Quirkily elegant handwritten neons, smart appropriations of Margate\u2019s cheerful arcade signage, are especially direct. \u201cI could have loved my innocence\u201d (2007) runs in white above a still shocking gathering of stitched and painted nudes: the fragmented \u201cJust Like Nothing\u201d (2009), inscribed \u201cYou made me Feel like nothing\u201d; a white mass bearing down on a broken body (\u201cRape\u201d, 2018); a slender figure shrouded in darkness (\u201cYou heard me Scream\u201d, 2022). <\/p>\n

\"An\u2018I whisper to My Past Do I have Another Choice\u2019 (2010), one of Emin\u2019s handwritten neon-lit works \u00a9 Tracey Emin\/DACS<\/p>\n

Converging art with the messy everyday, Emin smashed taboos about women\u2019s bodies, desires, abuse, periods, pregnancy. Long before #MeToo, her raunchy vernacular yanked female working class life into the rarefied, male-dominated establishment. That is a triumph, assuring her place in British art history. <\/p>\n

The price? The show is one extended howl of agony. Its title recalls Matisse\u2019s declaration of \u201cune seconde vie\u201d, when he felt reborn after a cancer operation at 71 and, wheelchair-bound, made the rapturous cut-outs. But although \u201cA Second Life\u201d shines in bright pink neon at the entrance, parallels are biographical only.<\/p>\n

Emin was treated for cancer in 2020 by the removal of many internal organs and now uses a stoma bag \u2014 graphic photographs line a tomblike corridor. In the catalogue she celebrates her post-recovery relocation to Margate, days spent painting, funding an art school and other community ventures, as \u201cmy second life\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009and this is heaven\u201d. It is a generous, fulfilled, heart-warming, giving-back story.<\/p>\n

\"A\u2018I am The Last of my Kind\u2019 (2019) by Tracey Emin \u00a9 Tracey Emin\/DACS<\/p>\n

It\u2019s absent, however, from the work. While inspiring sympathy, Emin\u2019s recent monumental paintings resemble an inner hellscape. In oozing, seeping, predominantly red paint washed across fragile outlined female forms \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m really a real physical painter\u201d \u2014 they evoke the body overwhelmed by haunted memories, submerged by illness, leaking, weeping, often dripping text too.<\/p>\n

The abortion trauma endures: drooping pink\/red figures \u2014 \u201cI did nothing wrong\u201d (2024), \u201cYou were still there\u201d (2018), addressing the blob of a foetus \u2014 are juxtaposed with an abbreviated black Christ, \u201cThe Crucifixion\u201d (2022). \u201cI am getting old now but not as old as my broken fucked up vagina that\u2019s so connected to my soul\u201d, scrawled around a downcast nude in \u201cI am the Last of my Kind\u201d (2019), suggests Emin\u2019s grave illness before her diagnosis.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never Asked to Fall in Love \u2014 You made me Feel like This\u201d (2018), a figure almost obliterated by sweeps of scarlet bleeding around a giant black crab, hangs with \u201cMy Bed\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018I never Asked to Fall in Love \u2014 You made me Feel like This\u2019 (2018) by Tracey Emin \u00a9 Tracey Emin\/DACS<\/p>\n

After cancer, the bed returns: sickbed for a shattered body in \u201cI went home\u201d (2023), refuge for heartbreak in the huddled mound in \u201cThe End of Love\u201d (2024), scene of heaving failing lovers in \u201cNot Fuckable\u201d (2024). Sparest and best, \u201cI watched Myself die and come alive\u201d (2023), a splayed-out nude in bed facing a dark upright spectre, is indebted to deathbed pictures by Edvard Munch, a major influence, along with Egon Schiele\u2019s febrile explicit drawings.<\/p>\n

Emin is steeped in art history. Like several ambitious contemporary women painters \u2014 Cecily Brown, Jenny Saville, Marlene Dumas \u2014 she reclaims mid-20th-century macho abstract expressionism as a living language for female experience. For her, slashing strokes, gestural touches and erasures, describe vulnerability, disfiguration, weakness \u2014 too well, for the compositions lack underlying strength and painterly power, and the relentless inward focus is constraining, facile. Joyless, repetitious, hardly distinguishable one from the next, these paintings are offered, it seems to me, as mere tokens, marks of Emin, like the relics, the neons.<\/p>\n

Tate\u2019s show, curated by outgoing director Maria Balshaw and a proud swansong for the socially engaged and feminist art which she has always championed, is an absolutely cohesive narrative exhibition. Emin tells her life as it is in a voice necessarily vehement, hectoring, narcissistic. This isn\u2019t a criticism: autobiographical art, especially survivors\u2019 tales, depends on an indomitable sense of self.<\/p>\n

Here too Emin has been ahead of the game, anticipating today\u2019s vogue for autofiction and life-writing \u2014 Karl Ove Knausgaard\u2019s My Struggle, Helen Garner\u2019s Baillie Gifford-winning diaries \u2014 while also looking centuries back, to romanticism, to the ideal of creativity based on the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling. \u201cArt is for feeling not for looking\u201d, she insists. As the mantra of a storyteller, it serves her well; for painting, it is fatally limiting.<\/p>\n

To August 31, tate.org.uk<\/p>\n

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