Tracey Emin

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Tracey Emin : biography

3 July 1963 –

Emin’s focus on painting has developed over the past few years, starting with the Purple Virgin (2004) acrylic watercolour series of purple brush strokes depicting her naked open legs, and leading to paintings such as Asleep Alone With Legs Open (2005), the Reincarnation (2005) series and Masturbating (2006) amongst others.

In May 2005 London’s Evening Standard newspaper highlighted Emin’s return to painting in their preview of her When I Think About Sex exhibition at White Cube. Other works were nude self-portrait drawings. Emin was quoted: "For this show I wanted to show that I can really draw, and I think they are really sexy drawings."

Work for her 2007 show at the Venice Biennale (see below) included large-scale canvases of her legs and vagina. A watercolour series called The Purple Virgins were displayed. There are ten Purple Virgin works in total, six of which were shown at the Biennale. These were accompanied by two canvases of a similar style called How I Think I Feel 1 and 2.

The Venice Biennale was also the first time Emin’s Abortion Watercolour series, painted in 1990, had ever been shown in public.

Jay Jopling uncovered a brand new Emin painting, Rose Virgin (2007), as part of White Cube’s stand at the Frieze Art Fair in London’s Regent’s Park on 10 October 2007. More new paintings are expected to be shown in Emin’s You Left Me Breathing exhibition in Los Angeles’ Gagosian gallery from 2 November 2007, described in a recent interview as an ‘exhibition of sculpture and painting’. A number of new paintings were on display including Get Ready for the Fuck Of Your Life (2007).

Photography

Emin has produced many photographic works throughout her career, including Monument Valley (Grand Scale) (1995–97) and Outside Myself (Monument Valley, reading ‘Exploration of the Soul’) (1995) which resulted "from a trip Emin made to the United States in 1994. She and her then boyfriend, the writer, curator and gallerist Carl Freedman, drove from San Francisco to New York stopping off along the way to give readings from her book, Exploration of the Soul 1994. The photograph shows the artist sitting in an upholstered chair in Monument Valley, a spectacular location on the southern border of Utah with northern Arizona, holding her book. Although it is open, it is not clear whether she is looking at the viewer or at the text in front of her. Emin gave her readings sitting in the chair, which she had inherited from her grandmother, which also became part of Emin’s art, There’s A Lot Of Money In Chairs (1994).". Tate Gallery. Retrieved on 25 February 2008.

Other photographic works include a series of nine images comprising the work Naked Photos – Life Model Goes Mad (1996) documenting a painting performance Emin made in a room specially built in Galleri Andreas Brändström, Stockholm. Another photographic series, Trying On Clothes From My Friends (She Took The Shirt Off His Back) (1997), shows the artist trying on her friends’ clothes offering up questions of identity.

Other works such as I’ve Got It All (2000) show Emin with her "legs splayed on a red floor, clutching banknotes and coins to her crotch. Made at a time of public and financial success, the image connects the artist’s desire for money and success and her sexual desire (her role as consumer) with her use of her body and her emotional life to produce her art (the object of consumption)". Whilst Sometimes I Feel Beautiful (2000) pictures Emin lying alone in a bath. Both these works are examples of Emin using "large-scale photographs of herself to record and express moments of emotional significance in her life, frequently making reference to her career as an artist. The photographs have a staged quality, as though the artist is enacting a private ritual."

Emin’s two self portraits taken inside her beach hut, The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don’t Leave Me Here I (2000) and The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don’t Leave Me Here II (2000) are a diptych although they are often exhibited and sold separately. They depict a naked Emin on her knees inside her beach hut which she and friend Sarah Lucas had bought in Whitstable, Kent in 1992. The hut itself later became the sculpture The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don’t Leave Me Here (The Hut) (1999). They are part of museum collections including Tate Modern, the Saatchi Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery (United Kingdom) and have been mass produced as postcards sold in museum shops around the world.