Major solo exhibition by Tracey Emin at White Cube, Bermondsey.
Coinciding with Frieze London, White Cube is pleased to present a major solo exhibition by Tracey Emin. Spanning the entirety of the Bermondsey gallery’s spaces, the presentation features new paintings and a monumental bronze sculpture by Emin, whose powerfully expressive, sometimes primal artistic approach marks her as one of the most compelling and singular artists working today.
Tracey Emin looks to her life for her primary material. With soul-searching candour, she probes the construct of the self but also the very impulse to create. Unfiltered, irreverent, raw, she draws on the fundamental themes of love, desire, loss and grief in works that are disarmingly and unashamedly emotional. ‘The most beautiful thing is honesty, even if it’s really painful to look at’, she has remarked.
Self-portraiture and the nude run throughout her practice, which Emin has described as being about ‘rites of passage, of time and age, and the simple realisation that we are always alone’. Her earliest works refer to her family, childhood and chaotic teenage years, growing up in the seaside town of Margate and leaving home at the age of fifteen. What happened next is explored, in a manner that is neither tragic nor sentimental, in drawing, painting, film, photography, sewn appliqué, sculpture, neon and writing, as the vicissitudes of relationships, pregnancies and abortions intersect with her commitment to the formal disciplines of art. Most recently, the artist has experienced her body as a battleground, through illness and ageing, on which she reports with characteristic fearlessness.
Tracey Emin: I followed you to the end
Date: 19 September – 10 November 2024
Location: White Cube Bermondsey, 144 – 152 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3TQ
Further Information: Tracey Emin, Bermondsey (2024) | White Cube