27 May – 25 June 2005
White Cube Hoxton Square
"When I think about sex... it makes me realize just how alone I feel. The idea of actually holding, touching, feeling a breath, knowing the smell of someone — and the fear of life. I am a demented warrior charging into battle on every heightened occasion. What the world perceives of me from the outside is not the same from within."
Tracey Emin 2005
Emin’s art discloses the intimate details of her life across a range of media: drawing, filmmaking, installation, painting, neon, photography, sewn work and sculpture. Emin exposes herself, her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in a direct and frank manner. Often tragic and frequently humorous, it is as if by telling her story and weaving it into the fiction of her art she transforms her idiosyncratic obsessions into issues of broader relevance.
Tracey Emin’s expressive and visceral art is one of disclosure, dealing with personal experience and heightened states of emotion. Frank and intimate but universal in its relevance, her work draws on the fundamental themes of love, desire, loss and grief, unravelling in the process the nuanced constructs of ‘woman’ and ‘self’ through probing self-exploration. ‘The most beautiful thing is honesty, even if it’s really painful to look at’, she has remarked.
FULL PROFILE