{"id":1812053,"date":"2026-03-06T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1812053"},"modified":"2026-03-06T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T07:00:00","slug":"review-tracey-emin-retrospective-at-tate-modern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1812053","title":{"rendered":"Review: Tracey Emin Retrospective at Tate Modern"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/8.-Tracey-Emin-Why-I-Never-Became-a-Dancer-1995-Tracey-Emin-a.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\t\u201cI\u2019m starting to think I am a really boring artist,\u201d admits Tracey Emin in the catalog accompanying her retrospective at the Tate Modern. It\u2019s quite the reflection from a woman who made her name on shock value. Her 1998 self-portrait-cum-performance-cum-sculpture My Bed<\/em>\u2014her actual, slept-in bed covered in the detritus of her life\u2014shook the art world with its confronting vulnerability and unspoken violence. Now, Emin\u2019s works are no longer made of discarded tampons and knickers, but of eminently sellable oil paint or bronze.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer Tate show is titled \u201cSecond Life.\u201d Emin faced a near-death battle with bladder cancer in 2020, and in the aftermath, she is reckoning with a sense of having a second lease on life, and with the newfound sense of responsibility that carries. \u201cI never took up the baton,\u201d she says. \u201cNow I\u2019m carrying it.\u201d But she\u2019s doing so not just in her determination to continue making art; her real contribution as elder stateswoman in the British art world is as a caretaker of the next generation. Emin\u2019s efforts to rejuvenate her hometown, the rundown seaside resort town of Margate, and to support the work of emerging artists, is staggering. She helped open Turner Contemporary, a major contemporary art space named after Margate\u2019s other local legend, JMW Turner; and her foundation funds multiple strands of artist residency programs, all of which offer studio space to artists for free. \u201cMy heaven is what I\u2019m creating,\u201d she says, \u201cthis world of art and art school, in a town that I knew, that I grew up in, that\u2019s completely changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat kind of work is much too expansive to fit inside a museum. The Tate show tells a more structured, contained story. It opens with some of Emin\u2019s earliest work: in My Major Retrospective II 1982-1992<\/em>, we see tiny little photographs, taken in 2008, of all the work she displayed in her first exhibition, \u201cMy Major Retrospective,\u201d which she then destroyed, saving it only in photographs. Then her late 1990s \u201cblankets,\u201d as she calls them: riotous quilted collages, covered in text that shouts things like FUCK SCHOOL WHY GO SOMEWHERE EVERYDAY TO BE TOLD YOU\u2019RE LATE<\/sub><\/small> and YEAH ILL HAVE YOUR BABY.<\/sub><\/small><\/p>\n

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View of Tracey Emin\u2019s 2026 exhibition \u201cA Second Life,\u201d showing My Bed<\/em> (1998) and It\u2019s Not me That\u2019s Crying its my Soul<\/em>, 2001.<\/span>Photo Jai Monaghan. \u00a9Tate.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tEmin\u2019s starkly embroidered textiles from 2009 are less full, more heartbreaking. Each only has one phrase; things like YOU MADE ME FEEL LIKE NOTHING<\/sub><\/small> and IS THIS A JOKE<\/sub><\/small> are stitched beneath scenes embroidered in stark black. Two films are absolutely golden: in one, Why I never became a dancer<\/em> (1995), scenes of Margate at sunset are voiced over by Emin describing the gross men she had sex with as a teenager, men who heckled her at a dance competition. Then, the video cuts to her dancing joyfully on her own as an adult. In the second, Emin & Emin<\/em> (1996), footage of the artist and her father swimming in the sea offers a portrait of generational love and the inheritance of the ocean. These early works are beautifully authentic, diaristic without being sloppy. It\u2019s hard to go from them to her recent paintings, which are so attractive but seem to be mostly surface (not to mention her neons, which are undeniably decorative).<\/p>\n

\n\tIt is impossible to disentangle Emin\u2019s work from her life, which makes it hard to be critical of either: both are unfalteringly raw. While her life post-cancer has been the dominant narrative Emin has spun in the public eye over the past few years, the exhibition she has crafted spins a tale that focuses on her abortion in the early 1990s as the pivotal event in her life and artistic evolution. In her film How it feels<\/em>, made in 1996, Emin returns to the sites of her abortion: her GP\u2019s office, the hospital, the park where she walked with her boyfriend at the time. She calls the abortion the \u201cbest fucking mistake of my life,\u201d a description whose inherent contradiction points to why Emin has been haunted by it ever since. Emin received appallingly poor medical care throughout her abortion, but what really plagues her is the fact that she wishes she could have had the baby. She describes the abortion as indicative of her failure: as an artist and as a person. It\u2019s \u201csomething I\u2019m doing just to preserve myself,\u201d she says in the film, as if that\u2019s a bad thing.<\/p>\n

\n\tImmediately following the film and other pieces about Emin\u2019s abortion, which span the 1990s to the 2020s, there is a corridor of Polaroids. On one side, the images depict Emin in 2001. They are raunchy and hot, mostly nude or in lingerie. On the other, the images depict her post-surgical, post-cancer body between 2020 and 2025, bleeding and weakened. With Emin\u2019s words from her film still echoing in my ears, it\u2019s hard not to encounter this space as if she feels punished for her own act of destruction. Coming through the other side, her bronze sculpture Ascension<\/em> (2024) is the first thing I see, a Christ-like figure hanging as if crucified on the wall. It\u2019s undeniably moving, a profound look into Emin\u2019s experience of loss and medical trauma. But the challenge of untangling Emin\u2019s personal trauma and the politics of abortion access is a knotty, perhaps impossible one.<\/p>\n

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Tracey Emin: I never Asked to Fall in Love \u2014 You made me Feel like This<\/em>, 2018. <\/span>\u00a9Tracey Emin.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tEmin has been viewed as a feminist artist, but she doesn\u2019t want to be. She has consistently rejected identifying as such, despite the clear ways in which her work sits within a conceptual legacy of feminist art, both aesthetically and in its relentless focus on her own subjectivity and embodiment. She rejects the possibility of reading her work through any lens other than realism: there is no sense of analogy, metaphor, symbolism; it\u2019s just her, right in front of us. She relies on language, on the actual physical traces of her body (blood, fingerprints, sweat, dirt), on storytelling. Her work is about her life, which has been punctured by horrific violence: child rape, medical misogyny, abusive relationships, poverty. It cannot not be political. But that sits very uncomfortably with Emin\u2019s resistance to expressing a desire for radical liberation larger than herself.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe expect much more of women artists than men artists. We require them to be activists, pioneers, perfect victims. Emin self-consciously rejects all that baggage, choosing to be outrageous and entirely self-serving in her art. And it is that commitment to herself that has made her a household name, an artist whose originality indelibly marked the art of the 1990s and early 2000s. She is a challenging, paradoxical, inscrutable figure\u2014and shows no signs of becoming any less so in her second life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/tracey-emin-retrospective-women-artists-abortion-bed-1234775740\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/8.-Tracey-Emin-Why-I-Never-Became-a-Dancer-1995-Tracey-Emin-a.jpg?w=1024″] \u201cI\u2019m starting to think I am a really boring artist,\u201d admits Tracey Emin in the catalog accompanying her retrospective at the Tate Modern. It\u2019s quite the reflection from a woman who made her name on shock value. Her 1998 self-portrait-cum-performance-cum-sculpture My Bed\u2014her actual, slept-in bed covered in the detritus of her life\u2014shook […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1812053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1812053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812053\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1812053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1812053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1812053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}