Name: You Can't Fuck A Shoe
Brand: Tracey Emin
Rating: 4.9 (197 reviews)

You Can't Fuck A Shoe
Signed Print

Tracey Emin

£1,700-£2,550Value
Indicator

$3,250-$4,850 Value Indicator

$2,900-$4,350 Value Indicator

¥15,000-¥23,000 Value Indicator

€2,000-€2,950 Value Indicator

$17,000-$25,000 Value Indicator

¥310,000-¥460,000 Value Indicator

$2,150-$3,200 Value Indicator

100% AAGR (5YR)

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Meaning & Analysis

This 2010 etching by Tracey Emin pictures two naively rendered high heeled shoes in blue ink. Around these strappy platform heels at the centre of the composition, haphazard daubs of ink are suggestive of Emin’s rapid and spontaneous approach to her printmaking process. Underneath the focal shoes are the witty words from which the work takes its title, written in Emin’s distinctive handwriting.

Synonymously witty and disturbing, You Can’t Fuck A Shoe is archetypal of Emin’s entire body of work. In her typically naive and sketchy style, Emin renders a pair of platform strappy heels. Underneath the sexy shoes are the words “You Can’t Fuck A Shoe” in Emin’s handwriting, perhaps as a satirical comment on the shoe as a fetish object. As a fetish object in the Freudian sense, shoes have a longstanding reputation in art history as being sexually suggestive - especially among the Surrealists. As Emin wryly suggests however, you can’t have sex with her platform heels, no matter how alluring they may be. As with many of Emin’s other prints and drawings, there is a rather infantile quality to this work, revealing her playful and ever explorational approach to sex.

Tracey Emin, born in 1963, stands as a fearless provocateur in the contemporary art scene. A trailblazer of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement in the late 1980s, the artist has sparked conversation and controversy for decades. Confronting themes of love, trauma and femininity with great vulnerability, Emin's work is a visceral tapestry of her life and has forged an intimate dialogue between artist and audience. 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).