4 March 2026

It’s hard being Tracey Emin

A major retrospective at the Tate Modern shows how the artist became the queen of the confessional – but is her work any good?

By Michael Prodger

The End of Love (2024) by Tracey Emin. Image via the Tate

What if?… what if young Tracey Emin hadn’t slept with so many feckless youths and older chancers in Margate? What if she hadn’t been abused as a child? What if she hadn’t been raped at 13? What if, as the daughter of a Turkish-Cypriot father and Roma mother, she hadn’t suffered racist abuse while growing up? What if she hadn’t had a botched abortion to terminate twins? What if she didn’t suffer the bladder cancer that has cost her both cervix and bladder and has left her with a stoma, or a further ailment that meant the removal of part of her small intestine? What if, instead, she had fallen in love as a teenager and married her sweetheart and lived contentedly as a fashion designer or dancer – both of which she once wanted to be? The answer is that she would have made no art at all, because she would have had no subject.

There is not a single piece among the 92 exhibits in Tate Modern’s major retrospective “Tracey Emin: A Second Life” – the biggest survey of her career – that is not explicitly about the travails of Tracey Emin. Every painting, embroidery, sculpture, video and photograph is testament to her role as the queen of the confessional. Her unapologetic, indeed excoriating self-exposure – about her body, sex, disappointment and pain – has led her to be lauded by many for her frankness, but what choice did she have? After all, early in her career, she said: “I realised that I was much better than anything I’d ever made.” She has stuck, unwaveringly, to that belief ever since.

And nor, she says, did she even have a choice about whether to be an artist or not. In a recent interview she pointed out that since she has no partner and no children the only thing of worth on which to centre her life is her art, which is why she takes it so seriously.

The impossibility of separating Emin from her work means that this reverential exhibition is as much a visual autobiography as an art show. It amounts at times to a fetishisation of her life. Here are miniature versions of all the early pictures she destroyed in a period of what she has called “emotional suicide” (so not totally destroyed, then), there are photographs of her parents and brother, and an early passport and a tooth Sellotaped next to the business card of the dentist who extracted it, accompanied by a bit of wafty free verse: “When the Dentist took out/my old Dead Tooth/It Felt like he’d taken away/Years of pain – It Seemed all/my Failures – had vanished – /All misery I had suffered/And made others suffer – All this gone”. That’s a lot of emotional baggage for a tooth.

While most people live life as it comes along, Emin experiences it as material. She has stressed over the years that art is about communication, and so repurposes her sensations and indignities for spectators as much for herself. In relating what it felt like to undergo a traumatic termination or simply to be used for meaningless sex and then dismissed as a “slag” she is undoubtedly unflinching. But there is a touch of pride in her solipsism too, and the assumption of an audience. Although whether viewers are as keen on seeing photographs of, say, her weeping stoma wound as she is on showing them is debatable.

A monographic exhibition does her few favours here. While it shows the range of the media in which she has worked, it also makes clear her limitations. The work for which she remains best known, My Bed (1998), is present, a period piece now, a curiosity displayed almost as a holy relic. Other remnants from her conceptual days include numerous text-heavy appliquéd fabrics and screeds of assorted writings, both therapeutic in the making, perhaps, but neither of which are visually rewarding. There are ranks of small, kneaded sculptures of her naked body, rudimentary works that are dignified by being cast in bronze. Weakest of all are her neon works mimicking her handwriting with their slogans comprising adolescent scrapbook profundities: “It’s Not me That’s Crying it’s my Soul”, “Meet Me In Heaven I Will Wait For You”, “I could have Loved my Innocence”.

With painting, however, she has forged a distinctive idiom. She makes big pictures covered with gestural marks and dribbles, and usually with a reduced palette of red, pink and blue – the stuff of blood, flesh and veins. Rivulets of watery acrylic drip down her canvases while rapid strokes delineate her figure, more often than not on a bed (she hasn’t really escaped since 1998 and, thanks to her illness, spends much time there still), in attitudes of despair, abandon and numbness, all wrapped in expressionist scumbling.

Nevertheless, Emin is not a strong draughtswoman – she can’t represent articulated joints, her faces, when neither hidden nor scrubbed out (this is not Everywoman, this is her), are at best rudimentary, there is no spatial progression, settings are mere suggestions, the figure is invariably drawn side on or full frontal because they offer the clearest outlines. Albeit such niceties may be surplus to her requirements. For all these shortcomings, some of the paintings, such as You heard me Scream (2022) – a standing blue nude against a mass of rabid brushstrokes – potently express the messiness of emotions and life itself. Together, however, they lose power rather than gaining it, functioning less as individual works that as parts of a mass – a long, drawn-out groan.

Emin is not alone in mining some of the unlovely aspects of the female body; Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Kiki Smith, and especially Mary Kelly with her Post-Partum Document (1976), have all made explicit – often controversially so – the continuity between their lived experience and anatomy and bodily fluids. None though have been as relentless in their self-focus as Emin, who in her art at least seems uninterested in the world outside herself.

What the exhibition also demonstrates is the perfect conjunction of Emin with the tenor of the times. It is hard to imagine that she could have sustained a 30-year, one-topic career in any age other than the present one, with its erosion of the distinction between the personal and the public. While life has not always been kind to Emin, in this at least she has been extremely fortunate. She has certainly turned this confluence to best effect, not just for herself – a rich, acclaimed, much-interviewed Dame of the British Empire – but for others too. She has been buying up swathes of Margate property and, laudably, opened her TKE Studios there in 2023 as affordable spaces for professional artists to work.

But there is no sense that she is done with herself yet. She appears to need, indeed almost welcome, the horrors: “That’s what binds me… the glue of me,” she says, “knowing that things hurt, and being able to feel that.” There are more than enough admirers willing to share her pain. But this exhibition also transmits the sense that her strengths simultaneously hold her back. She makes literal art with precious little space for subtleties of any kind. Perhaps there is no room for nuance under such intensity of feeling. And at 62, physical indignities will keep coming ever more quickly. But before more arrive, she might want to drag her eyes from herself for a bit; get outside, go and draw a tree.

Tracey Emin: A Second Life
Tate Modern, London SE1. Until 31 August

[Further reading: Cynthia Erivo’s one-man Dracula misses the point]