Tracey Emin - 20 Years

The Show

Famously, Tracey Emin’s art is all about Tracey Emin. She experienced a difficult childhood; her teenage years provided the inspiration for much of her later work which is autobiographical and often disturbingly frank.

She studied at the Royal College of Art in London from 1987 to 1989, eventually destroying all her work following a traumatic abortion. She only began working again around 1993, producing confessional letters, and then combining texts with objects and mementos from her youth. These works propelled her to the forefront of the YBA (Young British Artist) scene.

The exhibition looks at the full range of her work, from the rarely seen early work to the iconic My Bed, 1998, and the room-sized installation Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, 1996. It includes a fabulous range of appliquéd blankets, paintings, sculptures, films, neons, drawings and prints, to provide the most complete view of Emin’s work ever mounted. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is the only UK venue for the show.

This section of the website allows you to obtain a feel for the exhibition before visiting. Take your time exploring some of the show’s major themes, and enjoy a preview of ten highlighted works.

This show contains works of an explicit nature. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Emin's Life

Like no other artist, Emin’s life and art are inextricably bound. Born in London in 1963, she grew up in Margate. Her father, a Turkish Cypriot, was already married, but thereafter split his time between the two families, spending three nights a week in Margate.

Emin had a difficult childhood and dropped out of school at thirteen. She squatted in London from the age of fifteen, and then lived in DHSS accommodation in Margate; one of her jobs was working the till at a sex shop. She then studied at art colleges in Essex and in London, before staging her first exhibition, at the White Cube Gallery, in London in 1993, when she was thirty. Since the mid-1990s she has been recognized as one of the leading figures of the YBA (Young British Artist) group.

Emin’s great achievement is to have drawn directly upon her background – the sort of background that remains uncharted territory in the world of art - and to have done so in a manner that is neither tragic nor sentimental. Subjects such as sex, her parents, her grandmother, Margate, fame, wealth and depression, emerged in her work in the 1990s in a raw, articulate and potent form.

Pregnancy

One of the themes running throughout Emin’s work is pregnancy. Told by a doctor that she was unlikely ever to bear children, she nevertheless fell pregnant and had an abortion in 1990. Following this traumatic episode she destroyed all her previous work and stopped painting for several years.

She did however continue making monoprints in the 1990s, many of which focus on the theme of abortion. Works of the late 1990s deal with the theme of motherhood: the video Conversation with my Mum 2001, is a discussion between Emin and her mother about whether or not she should have children. It is a theme which recurred in Emin’s art as she entered her late thirties.

Margate

Margate is a seaside resort on the Kent coast, full of small hotels, guesthouses and amusement arcades and a funfair. Once popular with holidaymakers from London, Margate became a victim of cheap foreign travel and was, in Emin’s youth, an unfashionable place. Emin grew up in the hotel run by her parents, ‘Hotel International’. It consisted of six seafront guest-houses knocked together into one hotel with about eighty bedrooms.

For the teenage Emin, a normal evening consisted of going to a pub or a disco, eating chips and then having sex, because it was enjoyable and didn’t cost anything. Although Emin has lived in London for many years, she still regards Margate as home and much of her work refers to the town and to her childhood and teenage years there.

Sex

Sex is the dominant theme in Emin’s work – and it is often a violent sex. This is not a new interest for her: her teenage diaries (which she has exhibited) detail her sexual exploits.

The exhibition features a group of recent paintings on the theme of sex. Although sex has been a dominant theme in western painting and sculpture for centuries, it has been a voyeuristic but ‘decent’ form of sex, presented in the guise of the female nude acting out scenes from classical literature; also, these works have been created by male artists. Emin’s paintings strip away all the finery to concentrate on sex pure and simple.

Tracey Emin - 20 Years
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art