Tracey Emin Detail of Love

The indeterminate spaces, shadowy figures and enigmatic nature of Tracey Emin’s paintings form a counterpoint to her recent gouaches, in which the themes of physical and psychological interiority come to the fore. In these fluid and tranquil sketches, the artist explores love as a sustaining but ultimately finite force. Contemplating the loss of her mother but also, in more recent times, her cat Docket (a constant domestic companion for almost two decades), Emin sublimates the joys and sorrows of these nurturing relationships into works that are personal, tender and yet extremely universal. While Emin has already made a number of works about her mother’s death, she has a non-figurative presence in the recent gouaches. Instead, we see intimate glimpses of ‘the ashes room’, with the casket as a sign of her enduring yet disembodied proximity. Docket, however, still seems to haunt the rooms, with the artist noting in one work ‘I see him all the time’. These fluid and spontaneous vignettes denote a combined physical and emotional reality, documenting both a concrete time and place as well as a state of mind. In this sense, they can also be viewed as a testament of Emin’s emotional ties to her home of many years, as though visual love letters to the profound and almost magical intertwining of memory and place.

By uniting these contrasting yet complementary works in the exhibition, which all bear witness to the pleasure and pain of love, be it carnal, unrequited, familial or unconditional, Emin channels a wealth of reflections into a body of work that explores the simplicity and complexity of human affections, saying: ‘all these tiny details and thousands more are details of love... It’s what makes us who we are...’.

Tracey Emin was born in 1963 in London. She currently lives and works between London, the South of France, and Margate, UK. She has exhibited extensively, including solo exhibitions in Europe, the US, South America and Australia. Emin represented Great Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 and was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2011. She was awarded the honour of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts in 2012. In November 2020, a major solo exhibition entitled The Loneliness of the Soul, will open at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The exhibition will tour to the Munch Museum in Oslo in Summer 2021, followed by the unveiling of The Mother, her permanent public commission for Oslo’s Museum Island.