Legs raised
2014

• Tracey EMIN

Tracey Emin’s work explores memories and experiences rendered in frank, poetic and intimate ways. Her work emerged during the period of the so-called Young British Artists, a group of non-conforming artists who heralded in a cultural shift known as ‘Cool Britannia’ in the early to mid 1990s, and has since continued to explore personal and universal themes.

Emin tackles broad themes of love, desire, loss, and grief, through the mediums of neon, bronze sculpture, acrylic and gouache painting. Her works also reference deeply personal experiences, either through text or the representation of the female form. Emin subverts the tradition of voyeurism with her nudes through abstracting the body – perhaps the artist’s own body, or a universal body – and presenting it as both eroticised and defenceless. Her gestural and figurative paintings similarly confront moments of extreme emotion, anguish, elation or pain.

As she moves across media, Emin pushes the potential of each to its extreme. She has described, for instance, her bronze sculptures as ‘more like drawings in a strange way’.