Tracey Emin

PROJECT
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’.

ABOUT
Tracey Emin CBE RA currently lives and works between London, the south of France and Margate, England. Her multi- disciplinary practice is introspective and confessional. Emin has exhibited extensively including major exhibitions at Munchmuseet, Oslo, 2021; the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2020; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2019; the Leopold Museum, Vienna, 2015; Turner Contemporary, Margate, 2012; and Hayward Gallery, London, 2011. In 1999 Emin was nominated for the Turner Prize for her installation My Bed, 1998. In 2007 Emin represented Great Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale. She was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2011 and in 2012 was made Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts.

Purchased with funds donated by Jo Horgan AM and Peter Wetenhall, 2023

Purchased with funds donated by Andrew and Judy Rogers, and NGV Foundation, 2023

Purchased with funds donated by Loti & Victor Smorgon Fund, 2014

Professor AGL Shaw AO Bequest, 2023

Suzanne Dawbarn Bequest, 2023

M.G. Chapman Bequest, 2023

The Nigel Peck AM and Patricia Peck Fund, 2023