Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want
Hayward Gallery, London SE1

The publicity image for Tracey Emin's first major London retrospective is of the rangy artist running naked down a narrow, cobbled street while holding aloft a Union Jack. All we can see of her are the backs of her legs and the enviably pert bottom. She may not be everyone's idea of "International Woman" (one of her appliquéd noms de plume), but that flag billows behind her like a superhero cape.

It's an image that embodies the Britart phenomenon: the YBAs were exuberant, wildly self-confident and driven by a bold entrepreneurial spirit that often made up for the amateurishess of their endeavours. Before we cross the threshold of the Hayward for this mid-career survey (Emin is now 48, which is as good an age as any to have one), it all seems so very - yawn - familiar. What more is there to learn about a celebrity artist who, many would say, has already confessed too much?

Despite expectations, however, this feels like a fresh and poignant exhibition. Co-curated by Carl Lauson and the Hayward's director, Ralph Rugoff, it compellingly argues that, seen as a whole, Emin's oeuvre is far greater than the sum of its parts. It is also one of the saddest shows I've been to in a long time.

Although there are echoes of the good-time (if deeply chaotic) Emin of old - a hot-pink neon sign on one wall reads "Is legal sex anal?" - this is really an exhibition that overturns her brash image. What sums it up more truthfully is a tiny self-portrait called From Memory - My Abortion (1995). With Emin's skilled draftsmanship, it portrays the artist lying on a hospital trolley, a vulnerable, ghostly figure. Her legs are spread and some darkly scribbled matter hovers in the air on bits of string as it's pulled out of her. A doll-like figure with a scribbled-out face floats malevolently above her chest.

The trauma of Emin's abortions as a 23-year-old has informed much of her work. It's there in the two miniature Van Gogh chairs out on the Hayward's terrace and in the discarded booties and unfinished shawl that Emin, oddly, started knitting when pregnant. It's certainly there in her absorbing 1996 film, How It Feels, in which she talks us through the whole botched process: her doctor was unaware of a twin pregnancy and the aftermath of the partial termination is told unflinchingly.

A filmed conversation between Emin and her mother, made in 2001, is equally uncomfortable to watch. Indeed, it made me cross as I listened to Emin's mother casually dismiss her daughter's yearning for a child. This is the brutal stuff of everyday familial relationships. We see how her mother's thwarted ambitions lead her to project her fear of motherhood on to her daughter.

Emin's art is often dismissed as therapy because of its confessional nature, yet she is a naturally gifted storyteller. This is evident from her early films and her handwritten anecdotes and diaries. In these, the messy, knotty stuff of life is given compelling dramatic form. l

Runs until 29 August. For more details visit: southbankcentre.co.uk