On display over 90 works including installations, paintings, sculptures, neons, videos, embroidery, and text-based pieces
At Tate Modern until August 30, art breathes life into the sails of culture. “Tracey Emin: A Second Life” places the British artist under the spotlight in an exhibition curated by Maria Balshaw, Alvin Li, and Jess Baxter. The retrospective spans over forty years of the artist’s career through more than 90 works, ranging from installations, paintings, and sculptures to neons, videos, embroidery, and text-based art. The exhibition’s corpus does not follow a chronological path; instead, it reflects thematic choices where the works interact like visual chapters of a personal history. This narrative of existence, where pain becomes universal, develops in two phases: the first marked by trauma and confession, the second linked to survival, illness, and transformation. The title itself, “A Second Life,” alludes to a biographical and creative fracture: on one side, the formative and breakout years defined by a raw poetics of confession; on the other, her most recent production, matured after serious health issues, where the body becomes a site of resistance and rebirth.
Born in 1963 in Croydon, she emerged as a leading figure of the Young British Artists movement in the 1990s
Born in 1963 in Croydon, Tracey Emin has stood out within the Young British Artists group since the 1990s for her direct use of self-representation, transformed into an artistic anguage through radical self-exposure. Themes such as sexuality, violence, abortion, depression, love, and loss lie at the heart of a body of work that questions and challenges the boundary between private life and public space. Global fame arrived in 1999 with My Bed, an iconic installation of British contemporary art, which is featured in this exhibition. The unmade bed, surrounded by personal belongings, is an extreme statement of vulnerability that redefines the relationship between intimacy and artistic representation. Among the most significant works is Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), which documents a moment of crisis and regeneration through a performance-installation.
Fame arrived in 1999 with My Bed: her unmade bed, surrounded by personal objects, became an extreme declaration of vulnerability
Significant space is dedicated to textile and text-based works, such as The Last of the Gold (2002) - an embroidered quilt that addresses the experience of abortion through an emotional and political alphabet - and to pieces linked to the memory of places. In particular, Margate, the artist’s hometown, is evoked as a space of both upbringing and injury. The sculpture It’s Not the Way I Want to Die (2005) reflects on risk, fragility, and childhood, with forms reminiscent of amusement parks. In the final section, the work appears more essential and intense, marked by illness and the awareness of the body as a battlefield. Recent works, such as Ascension (2024) and I Followed You Until the End (2023), testify to a more concentrated approach, where eros, spirituality, and pain coexist in an almost monumental dimension.
