Tracey Emin first rose to fame as a fixture among the Young British Artists of the 1990s. Her 1999 Turner Prize-nominated installation "My Bed" ignited fury and fascination in equal measure. Critics and columnists reduced her to spectacle: a narcissistic, exhibitionist “Art It girl". Yet this sensationalist clamor obscured the genuine force driving her artistic practice, dismissing as mere shock what was, in reality, a deliberate strategy for making private suffering legible.
Born in 1963 to a British mother and a Turkish Cypriot father, Tracey Emin endured racist abuse, sexual violence as a teenager in Margate, and later, abortion and cancer. She has refused to bury any of it. Instead, she transmuted each wound into raw material — through paintings, drawings, installations, embroidery, video, neon text, and sculpture — constructing a body of work that is at once unflinching autobiography and broader meditation on womanhood and vulnerability. The retrospective currently at Tate Modern, titled "Second Life" in a nod to her outliving a grim medical prognosis, gathers this vast output into a single survey.
I guess I’m the only person who considers “My Bed” (1998) her best work. Like other avant-garde artists before her she proclaimed that this too is art. Why would a painting of her unmade bed be art and not the unmade bed itself?
While I find her artistic output as a whole interesting, most of her individual works leave me indifferent. Her paintings, which vaguely reminded me of Willem de Kooning, look rather interchangeable to me. I usually schedule between one and two hours for an exhibition, but for once I left after less than half an hour.
Having said that, Emin’s work is a testimony to the cathartic power of art. She fearlessly displays her own fears and obsessions. Instead of succumbing to victimhood or self-pity she confronts life with defiance. Whenever life knocks her down she gets up and creates another work of art. And so, even though her work doesn’t appeal to me, it does inspire me and that, too, is a form of praise.
Tracey Emin. A Second Life is at Tate Modern, London until 31 August 2026.