Tracey Emin’s art is one of disclosure, using her life events as inspiration for works ranging from painting, drawing, video and installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture. Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in candid and, at times, excoriating work that is frequently both tragic and humorous.

Emin’s work has an immediacy and often sexually provocative attitude that firmly locates her oeuvre within the tradition of feminist discourse. By re-appropriating conventional handicraft techniques – or ‘women’s work’ – for radical intentions, Emin’s work resonates with the feminist tenets of the ‘personal as political’. In Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With, Emin used the process of appliqué to inscribe the names of lovers, friends and family within a small tent, into which the viewer had to crawl inside, becoming both voyeur and confidante. Her interest in the work of Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele particularly inform Emin’s paintings, monoprints and drawings, which explore complex personal states and ideas of self-representation through manifestly expressionist styles and themes.

Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963, and studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. She has exhibited extensively internationally, including solo exhibitions ‘Love is What You Want’, Hayward Gallery, London (2011),  ‘Do Not Abandon Me’, Hauser & Wirth, London (with Louise Bourgeois) (2011), ‘Walking with Tears’ Royal Academy of Art, London (2010). In 2008 Emin held her first major retrospective ‘Tracey Emin 20 Years’ at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which subsequently toured to Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Malaga (2008) and Kunstmuseum Bern (2009). Previous major shows include ‘This is Another Place’, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford (2002), ‘Ten Years. Tracey Emin’, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002), ‘I Need Art Like I Need God’, South London Gallery, London (1997) and Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen (1998). She has also participated in a number of major international group exhibitions in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Japan, Australia, The United States and Chile. In 2007 Emin represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale, was made a Royal Academician and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London, a Doctor of Letters from the University of Kent and Doctor of Philosophy from London Metropolitan University. She lives and works in London.