Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin looks to her life as subject for her poetic and autobiographical work that spans painting, drawing, installation, neon text, photography, embroidery, film and sculpture. Born in 1963 in Croydon, London, Emin emerged as a leading figure in the Young British Artists (YBA) movement in the 1990s and is one of today’s most recognisable contemporary artists.

In the 1980s Emin first studied fashion at Medway College of Design and then printmaking at Maidstone Art College (both now part of the University for the Creative Arts). In 1987 she moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art where she was largely influenced by the art Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele.

Emin is a member of the Young British Artists, a loose group of British artists who began to exhibit together in 1988. The YBAs included Damien Hirst, Ian Davenport, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, among others. In 1993 Emin partnered with Sarah Lucas to open ‘The Shop’ at 103 Bethnal Green Road in Bethnal Green. This project marked a starting point in both artists’ careers at a moment when London was transforming into the commercial powerful in today’s art world. Later that year she had her first solo exhibition at White Cube.

Emin’s work has always been autobiographical and confessional. In Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), Emin created a blue tent, appliquéd with the names of everyone she had shared a bed with, uncovering childhood traumatic experiences and sexual violence. The piece, also known as the ‘Tracey Emin tent’, was bought by Charles Saatchi and included in the infamous 1997 Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Together with Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, Emin’s masterpiece My Bed (1998) have made strides in challenging and changing the way the world thinks about art. Operating as an unconventional ‘self-portrait’, Emin’s work reinvigorates the connection between art and life through the combination of previously unexplored media. Continuing the legacy of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade, My Bed is the artist’s real, wooden bed, exposing Emin’s personal life, replete with all its indiscretions, insecurities, and imperfections. The work sold for £2,546,500 at Christie’s London in 2014, a world auction record for the artist.

In 2020 Emin was diagnosed with squamous-cell bladder cancer. After remission, she created a series of raw and emotional paintings, dealing with the power and fragility of the human body with visceral expressions of hope, turmoil, pain and healing. It was Emin’s experience of cancer, notably, that played a key role in her decision to found TKE Studios, an artists’ enclave near Margate beach providing a residency programme of free lectures, tutorials and studio space for art student, furnishing her with a renewed sense of positivity and desire to bring about change. 

Emin recalled in her 2005 autobiography, Strangeland, the challenges and beauty of growing up in Margate, which she referred to as a ‘derelict seaside town’, during the 1970s. This upbringing has proven significantly formative to Emin and she repeated referenced Margate throughout her oeuvre. Forty years later, the artist is determined to help transform the town and build her legacy in the place where she grew up.