The self-styled "Mad Tracey from Margate", Tracey Emin (born 1963) grew up in the English seaside town of Margate, the daughter of an unmarried mixed-ethnicity couple. Her early life has been detailed extensively in her artwork, notably in Exploration of the Soul (1994) and Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995).
Art Education and Early Career
Emin graduated from the Maidstone College of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1986, and the Royal College of Art in London in 1989, with a Master of Art in Painting. In 1993, Emin collaborated with friend and colleague Sarah Lucas, opening a shop in London’s Bethnal Green (“The Shop”), where they sold their own artwork and witty objets, like the “Damien Hirst ashtrays” (ashtrays emblazoned with the image of Britart icon Damien Hirst).
As the shop became a modish meeting place on the London art scene, Emin met art impresario Jay Jopling and was invited to exhibit at his innovative new gallery, White Cube, in 1993. Her first solo show was ironically titled My Major Retrospective, an autobiographical assemblage including polaroid snapshots of her early paintings, which she had destroyed.
Emin would later publicly confront the demons she had since associated with painting in a live gallery performance piece, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made at the Galleri Andreas Brandstrom, Stockholm, in 1996. Locked naked in a room on public view surrounded by painting materials, Emin grappled with her creative aversions, breaking through initially by revisiting early influences like Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele and former boyfriend Billy Childish.
Britart Scene
Emin’s emergence as an artist came at a rich and vibrant time in the British art world, and she has been associated with the Young British Artists movement typified by the collection of the prodigious patron and champion of contemporary art, Charles Saatchi. Emin’s controversial Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995) was included in the travelling Saatchi collection exhibition Sensation, which caused a maelstrom of publicity in 1999 when it appeared at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and incurred the wrath of then-New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. In 1999, Emin was also shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize, for her multimedia installation, My Bed (1998).
Artistic Development
Emin's prolific career has embraced a diverse array of media - from the well-known installations and appliques, to video, photography, writing and film, monoprints and drawings popular for private collection, neon and sculpture, increasingly for civic public display - while revisiting the common themes now associated archetypally with Tracey Emin: sex, loneliness, depression and kindred ties.
Emin's work also resonates powerfully as feminist art on several levels: incorporating traditional "women's craft" elements like embroidery in an empowering context; exploring the subjects of abortion, pregnancy and violence against women; and addressing issues of sexuality with a frank forthrightness, even an aggression historically the exclusive domain of male artists.
A figure of artistic importance even greater than her outsized, provocative persona, Tracey Emin had her actual first major retrospective in 2008, with the show Tracey Emin: 20 Years at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.
Tracey Emin Notable Works
- My Major Retrospective (1993), assemblage
- Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), video
- Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, (1995), appliqued tent (destroyed in Momart warehouse fire, 2004)
- Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), multimedia installation, paintings and drawings
- Mad Tracey from Margate (1997), patchwork quilt
- My Bed (1998), multimedia installation
- I’ve Got It All (2000), digital print
- Hate and Power Can Be a Terrible Thing (2004), appliqued blanket
- The Roman Standard (2005), bronze
- Legs (2008), neon
Tracey Emin Selected Bibliography
- Brown, Neal. Tracey Emin (Modern Artists Series) [London: Tate Publishing, 2006]
- Elliot, Patrick, ed. Tracey Emin 20 Years [Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2008]
- Emin, Tracey. Strangeland [London: Sceptre, 2005]
- Fortnum, Rebecca. Contemporary British Women Artists in their own words, (New York and London: I.B. Tauris, 2007)
- Freedman, Carl; Rudi Fuchs and Jeanette Winterson. Tracey Emin: Works 1963-2006 [New York: Rizzoli, 2006]
- Townsend, Chris; and Mandy Merck, ed. The Art of Tracey Emin [London: Thames & Hudson, 2002]
 |
 |
