🇬🇧Tracey
Emin

Tracey Emin grew up in Margate, a seaside town on the Kent coast whose faded grandeur and economic decline formed the backdrop to a childhood she has described with unflinching candour across thirty years of artistic production. Her father was a Turkish Cypriot hotel owner with another family; her mother was English. The family had money and then did not. As a teenager she experienced a sexual assault that she has spoken about publicly in interviews and referenced in several major works — an event that interrupted her education and redirected the early trajectory of her life. She left school at sixteen and, for a period, lived rough. She later enrolled at Maidstone College of Art and then, after a brief but decisive period working in print, at the Royal College of Art, where she graduated in 1989. By then she had already developed the working method that would define her career: making art from the raw material of her own life, with nothing sentimentalised and nothing withheld.

In the early 1990s, after a period of creative crisis in which she described burning most of her artwork and deciding she had nothing left to make, she began producing the works that would establish her publicly. With Damien Hirst's gallerist friend Sarah Lucas she opened a short-lived shop called The Shop (1993) in Bethnal Green, selling T-shirts and customised goods as a semi-artistic, semi-commercial project. Her first solo show, My Major Retrospective (1993–94), presented at the White Cube gallery's inaugural space, contained photographs, letters, drawings, and reproductions of personal ephemera — evidence of a life rather than representations of it. She was beginning to work out how to make the biographical into the universal.

The work that made her famous internationally arrived in 1998. Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 was a blue camping tent with 102 names appliquéd in fabric on the interior — everyone she had ever shared a bed with, including her grandmother, childhood friends, and sexual partners. It was shown at Charles Saatchi's "Sensation" exhibition at the Royal Academy and destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004. Then came My Bed. Following a period of severe depression in which she had not left her bed for several days, she emerged to look at the sheets — stained, dishevelled, surrounded by detritus of her illness, including vodka bottles, cigarette packets, used condoms, and soiled underwear — and recognised it as a work of art. She transferred the entire thing to the gallery. Critics raged; the public queued. It was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999.

The neon text works, which she began producing in the mid-1990s and which have continued throughout her career, carry single phrases rendered in her own handwriting — declarations of love, sexual desire, grief, and longing that flicker in pink and white light on gallery walls. Works like You Forgot to Kiss My Soul (2001), I Promise to Love You (2007), and More Passion (2011) deploy the aesthetic of advertising to deliver messages of profound personal intimacy. They are her most widely reproduced works and, in some ways, her most complete formal statement: vulnerability encoded in a medium designed for bombast, confession made luminous.

She was elected a Royal Academician in 2007 and appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2011 — the institution that had once exhibited her tent and watched visitors argue in front of it. In 2012 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire. My Bed was acquired by Charles Saatchi and resold at Christie's in 2014 for £2,546,500 to German collector Count Christian Dürckheim, who loaned it to Tate Britain, where it continues to be exhibited.

In 2016 she moved to Antibes, France, and began a sustained period of painting that many critics have called the most significant work of her late career — large-scale figurative canvases depicting bodies in states of ecstasy, grief, and desire, executed in loose expressive brushwork that recalls Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch but is unmistakably her own. In 2021 she disclosed that she had been treated for bladder cancer. She has continued working throughout. The girl from Margate who was told by her first art teacher that she had no talent has spent forty years proving the most personal material available — her own lived experience — to be inexhaustibly rich.