Tracey Emin: Biography & Artwork

Tracey
Emin

Known for her unflinching studies of past experiences, trauma, sexuality and emotions, YBA queen Tracey Emin’s trailblazing career has divided opinion since the 1990s. Buy and sell original prints and editions by leading artist Emin. We can value your print for free with zero obligation to sell and offer market advice on any work in Emin's portfolio.

Biography

YBA heavyweight and controversial, confessional, artist Tracey Emin is best known for her intimate sketches, sculptures and installations. Her practice spans painting, embroidery, film, drawing, sculpture and neon, yet remains grounded in themes of love, desire, pain, grief and the female experience.

Born in South London in 1963, Emin was brought up by her family in Margate, Kent. In 1987, Emin moved to London to study painting at the Royal College of Art. After graduating, Emin went through two abortions. This experience of pain, loss and loneliness proved fundamental in the development of her artistic vocabulary. Emin's works are instantly recognisable in their autobiographical and intimate quality and have won over the heart of even the most sceptics. In 1999, this raw approach to storytelling won her a nomination to the Turner Prize and, in 2007, it got her a coveted spot as a Royal Academician at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA).

Emin had her first solo exhibition Every Part of Me’s Bleeding at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in 1999. The show contained works across a variety of mediums, including the installation that helped to launch her career and reputation, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, or The Tent (1994). Presented at the Young British Artist's show, this work consisted of a canvas tent, with 102 names of every person Emin had ‘slept’ with sewn into the walls.
Another of Emin’s most notorious works is her installation My Bed, for which she got nominated to the Turner Prize in 1999. An iconic Tracey Emin artwork, My Bed was created in response to Emin’s grief following a breakup and made no attempt to hide the ugly reality. Consisting of the artist’s own bed, we see soiled sheets and underwear, empty alcohol bottles, condoms, and even bodily fluids utilised by Emin here. This work recreated the physical aftermath of what the artist called her “mini nervous breakdown” where she did not leave her bed for four days. Despite Emin not winning the Turner Prize that year, her name was irrevocably solidified in the leading contemporary art scene.

In addition to her shocking installations, Emin is well known for her neon works and her drawings, many of which self-portraits, where all of her fragility best come to life. Her Nude Drawings and Nude Self-Portraits series show the artist at her most vulnerable, unafraid of showing her true self. In her neon works, the artist communicates her emotions directly with the viewer through short, often intentionally misspelled, phrases. As Emin claims, “neon is emotional for everybody.”

In an interview in 2006, Emin stated that expressionist artists such as Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch have always been sources of inspiration for her. Munch’s 1895 painting Jealousy in particular spoke to a sense of self-effacement and brutal personal honesty that Emin is now known for herself. Indeed, the two artist’s works were paired in the recent Royal Academy Exhibition, Loneliness of the Soul, in 2021, where Emin’s choice of Munch works demonstrates their similarities.
Her use of neon lighting also indicates the influence of artist Bruce Nauman, and Emin’s focus on the confessional, and of the female experience draws influence from earlier feminist artists such as Carolee Schneeman and Frida Khalo.
Emin’s work is often viewed in terms of the abuse she suffered as a young teenager, and Emin herself has never shied away from discussing her rape at age 13, and the culture of sexual assault that surrounded her in her town growing up, as something that 'happened to a lot of girls.'
Emin joined the Young British Artists group, alongside huge names such as Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas in the early 90s. Her and Lucas opened The Shop in Bethnal Green in 1993, where they sold their works, namely t-shirts and ashtrays printed with slogans the pair created. While her media presence became less sensational after the 1990s, Emin remained a seminal figure in British contemporary art, with many high profile celebrity collectors, including Elton John and Orlando Bloom. She represented Britain in the 2007 Venice Biennale and was made a Royal Academician that same year.
She was appointed a CBE in 2013 and currently resides in Margate after surviving her battle with bladder cancer. When she does die she expresses her hope that her studio here will become a museum.

“I have always treated my blanket-making more like a painting in terms of building up layers and textures,” Emin said of her textile artworks. “I have never called them quilts. I have always called them blankets. They were most definitely blankets at the beginning because they were made with the intention of going on a bed.” When she sold her first blanket artwork Hotel International in 1994, Emin went to bed and “cried at the idea of [the work] going away”.

Mad Tracey From Margate. Everyone’s Been There, created in 1997, stitches together memories of the artist’s childhood growing up in the coastal town of Margate (which she writes more about in her memoir, Strangeland, published in 2005). The heartfelt early work was offered at Christie’s Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale in London on 16 October 2014, where it sold for £722,500.