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Lot Essay
Held in the same private collection since its creation, I told you don’t try to find me is a masterwork that represents a touchstone in Tracey Emin’s painterly practice. Painted in 2007—the year that she represented Britain at the Venice Biennale—it was subsequently included in her first UK museum retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, in 2008. Rare for its thick, intuitive brushwork and rich impasto, the work stands among the artist’s first great large-scale paintings on canvas, capturing the expressive, lyrical language that would go on to define her practice. In the centre lies the trace of a naked reclining woman, her form rendered with schismatic black lines. Writ large with the influence of Egon Schiele and Cy Twombly, a maelstrom of colour and texture rains down upon her: washes of rich peach-coloured acrylic spread across the canvas like a seascape, dripping poetically down the length of the picture plane. The roughly-hewn words of the work’s title shifts in and out of focus, spilling into abstract, calligraphic daubs of ochre and blue. It is a poignant, self-reflective image, whose faint, half-legible plea for solitude is offset by the glimmering prospect of salvation.
Today, painting lies at the heart of Emin’s multimedia practice. Following her recovery from cancer in 2020, the artist has made an impassioned return to the medium, using it as a vehicle for processing her journey through trauma, pain and healing. These recent creations have their origins in works such as the present, informed by their visceral dialogue between paint and the human figure. Emin’s relationship with the medium, however, is complex. Her pregnancy and abortion in 1990 caused her to cease all painterly activity in the early years of her practice, unable to shake the feelings of guilt, failure and nausea induced by the smell of oil paint. Six years later, Emin made a powerful bid to overcome her fears: her ground-breaking installation Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996) saw her paint naked before a live audience for three weeks, wilfully reconnecting the medium to her own body. As her practice evolved, her paintings would continue to stage dramatic encounters between free abstract textures and fluid traces of the female form. By the time of the present work, Emin had begun to paint on grand, operatic scales, each canvas a deeply personal record of her own carnal intimacy with paint.
Having recently launched her pioneering TKE Studios in Margate, Emin has spent time reflecting upon the artists who inspired her own development. While her gestural language owes much to Twombly and the Abstract Expressionists, the raw, confessional tenor of her practice is deeply informed by the lessons of German Expressionism. Schiele and Munch were particularly significant: Emin has exhibited opposite both, most recently in dialogue with the latter at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2021. The present work’s supine figure, notably, is evocative of Schiele’s reclining women, every inch of her form alive with visceral sensation. The emotive depth of both artists’ practices, meanwhile, would fuel the diaristic, autobiographical impulses of Emin’s art: fragments of her own handwriting, like lines from a torn-up poem, filter through her blankets, neon sculptures, paintings and drawings. In I told you don't try to find me, body and voice come together in fleeting unison; word, flesh and paint become one, simultaneously obscuring and nourishing one another. Each is by turns buried and illuminated across the canvas, echoing the plaintive lyric of the work’s title.
Today, painting lies at the heart of Emin’s multimedia practice. Following her recovery from cancer in 2020, the artist has made an impassioned return to the medium, using it as a vehicle for processing her journey through trauma, pain and healing. These recent creations have their origins in works such as the present, informed by their visceral dialogue between paint and the human figure. Emin’s relationship with the medium, however, is complex. Her pregnancy and abortion in 1990 caused her to cease all painterly activity in the early years of her practice, unable to shake the feelings of guilt, failure and nausea induced by the smell of oil paint. Six years later, Emin made a powerful bid to overcome her fears: her ground-breaking installation Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996) saw her paint naked before a live audience for three weeks, wilfully reconnecting the medium to her own body. As her practice evolved, her paintings would continue to stage dramatic encounters between free abstract textures and fluid traces of the female form. By the time of the present work, Emin had begun to paint on grand, operatic scales, each canvas a deeply personal record of her own carnal intimacy with paint.
Having recently launched her pioneering TKE Studios in Margate, Emin has spent time reflecting upon the artists who inspired her own development. While her gestural language owes much to Twombly and the Abstract Expressionists, the raw, confessional tenor of her practice is deeply informed by the lessons of German Expressionism. Schiele and Munch were particularly significant: Emin has exhibited opposite both, most recently in dialogue with the latter at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2021. The present work’s supine figure, notably, is evocative of Schiele’s reclining women, every inch of her form alive with visceral sensation. The emotive depth of both artists’ practices, meanwhile, would fuel the diaristic, autobiographical impulses of Emin’s art: fragments of her own handwriting, like lines from a torn-up poem, filter through her blankets, neon sculptures, paintings and drawings. In I told you don't try to find me, body and voice come together in fleeting unison; word, flesh and paint become one, simultaneously obscuring and nourishing one another. Each is by turns buried and illuminated across the canvas, echoing the plaintive lyric of the work’s title.