Tumultuous life

For a long time, Tracey Emin, superstar from across the Channel, was seen as the Young British Artist who shouted the loudest about her personal life. But was her work truly seen? Not so sure. Articles mostly recounted the tumultuous episodes of her own life.

Women’s experience

“People didn’t realize that what I was talking about was actually about women’s experiences in general: rape, abortion, teenage sexuality and its abuses…” She expressed her sorrows through neon signs crafted in the glass-blowing tradition. She embroidered them into patchwork pieces. Emin is not Catholic, but her work conveys an ancient aesthetic of martyrdom.

She chronicled what she suffered—like in 1996, when, after two pregnancies that did not come to term, she sought to exorcise her demons by confining herself for three weeks in a closed space, enclosing her pain within it. She could no longer paint. “It was as if I needed to punish myself by giving up the thing I loved the most.”

What remains of that performance today is an installation resembling a chaotic bedroom filled with drawings, large handwritten phrases on sheets of paper, scattered clothing and trash too. The piece, presented as is, is currently on display at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence through July 20, part of a major exhibition showcasing about sixty works by the British artist for the first time in Italy.

Arturo Galansino

Arturo Galansino, director of Palazzo Strozzi, considers her “one of today’s great masters, thanks to her uncompromising honesty. People identify with her.” (See here and here an other interview of Arturo Galansino)

Since the 1990s, Tracey has come a long way. Born to a Cypriot father and a Romani mother in the working-class seaside town of Margate, she has since founded an art school and an exhibition space there. In February 2025, she was even knighted by the King of England, becoming Dame Tracey Emin. “You know, where I come from, people don’t become ‘Dames’. In the past, people had a problem with my social class, with my attitude too.”

Rebirth

In fact, there is the Tracey from before 2020 and another from after. Though the exhibition is not organized chronologically, it reveals her recent rebirth. As always, Emin does not hold back. Four and a half years ago, she was diagnosed with an advanced cancer.

She describes the organs that were removed and her chronic bleeding, which she has represented in her paintings, dominated by shades of red. “I was given six months to live. I didn’t want to leave behind that kind of memory.”

Between abstraction and figuration

From then on, she reinvented herself through painting, developing a style between abstraction and figuration, made up of layered of paint, tangled forms, drips and bold strokes on large canvases. One recognizes in them couples and female figures, odalisques emerging as if by magic from a tangle of lines. “When I step into the studio, I’m happy. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Then the painting takes over.”

Harry Weller, her close collaborator since 2009 and now the only person she works with, describes her method: “She keeps painting until she surprises herself. If it’s too easy, just visually appealing, she loses interest and paints over it.”

Sex and Solitude

On the Renaissance façade of Palazzo Strozzi, a neon sign in Emin’s signature handwriting reads: “Sex and Solitude.” “That’s the whole human experience. For a long time, sex was my way of exploring the world. Whether good or bad, it was sexual energy that drove me. That’s no longer the case today,” concludes the once scandalous Tracey.

On view through July 20.
www.palazzostrozzi.org/en/archivio/exhibitions/tracey-emin/