Tracey Emin
Dame Tracey Karima Emin is an English artist known for autobiographical and confessional artwork. She produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Emin was elected as a Royal Academician in 2016.
In 1997, her work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, a tent appliquéd with the names of everyone the artist had ever slept with, was shown at Charles Saatchi's Sensation exhibition held at the Royal Academy in London. In the same year, she gained considerable media exposure when she appeared to be drunk, and swore repeatedly, on a live television broadcast of a British discussion programme called The Death of Painting.
In 1999, Emin had her first solo exhibition in the United States at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, entitled Every Part of Me's Bleeding. Later that year, she was nominated for the Turner Prize and exhibited My Bed – a readymade installation, consisting of her own unmade dirty bed, in which she had spent several weeks drinking, smoking, eating, sleeping and having sexual intercourse while undergoing a period of severe emotional flux. The artwork featured used condoms and blood-stained underwear.
Emin is also a panelist and speaker: she has lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the Tate Britain in London about the links between creativity and autobiography, and the role of subjectivity and personal histories in constructing art. In December 2011, she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy; with Fiona Rae, she is one of the first two female professors since the Academy was founded in 1768. Emin lived in Spitalfields, East London,before returning to Margate, where she funds the TKE Studios with workspace for aspiring artists.
Biography
Early life and education
Emin was born in Croydon, a district of south London, to an English mother of Romanichal descent and a Turkish Cypriot father. She was brought up in Margate, Kent, with her twin brother, Paul.Emin shares a paternal great-grandfather with her second cousin Meral Hussein-Ece, Baroness Hussein-Ece.
Her work has been analysed within the context of early adolescent and childhood abuse, as well as sexual assault. Emin was raped at the age of 13 while living in Margate, citing assaults in the area as "what happened to a lot of girls." Emin later said in an article she wrote for the Evening Standard that she had "no memory of being a virgin", citing numerous times she was raped as a young teenager.
She studied fashion at Medway College of Design . There she met expelled student Billy Childish and was associated with The Medway Poets. Emin and Childish were a couple until 1987, during which time she was the administrator for his small press, Hangman Books, which published his confessional poetry. From 1983–86 she studied printmaking at Maidstone Art College where she graduated with a first class degree in Printmaking. Also, whilst at Maidstone college of Art, Tracey Emin encountered Roberto Navickas aka Roberto Navikas, a name which was later to feature prominently in her "tent". Emin however, mistakenly misspelled his name by dropping a C. Navickas used this error to promote two artworks of his own, some twenty odd years later when re-entering the art world. The works were titled "The Lost C of Emin: The Discovery" & "The Lost C of Emin: A Reliquary".
In 1995, she was interviewed in the Minky Manky show catalogue by Carl Freedman, who asked her, "Which person do you think has had the greatest influence on your life?" To which she replied, "Uhmm... It's not a person really. It was more a time, going to Maidstone College of Art, hanging around with Billy Childish, living by the River Medway".
In 1987, Emin moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, where in 1989 she obtained an MA in painting. After graduation, she had two traumatic abortions and those experiences led her to destroy all the art she had produced in graduate school and later described the period as "emotional suicide".
One of the paintings that survives from her time at Royal College of Art is Friendship, which is in that university’s Collection. A series of photographs from her early work that was not destroyed was displayed as part of , a solo exhibition held at the White Cube gallery in London, from 19 November, 1993 to 8 January, 1994.
Her influences include Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, and for a time she studied philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.
Career beginnings
On 3 January 1993, Emin opened a shop with fellow artist Sarah Lucas, called The Shop at 103 Bethnal Green Road in Bethnal Green, which sold works by the two of them, including T-shirts and ashtrays with Damien Hirst's picture stuck to the bottom. The venue also contained a life-drawing room in the basement, and studio space where Emin and Lucas worked. Emin and Lucas were able to fund The Shop with money Lucas had from Charles Saatchi. The Shop was open for six months and closed with Emin's 30th birthday - 'Fuckin’ Fantastic at 30 and Just About Old Enough to Do Whatever She Wants'. After it closed, Emin burned everything that was left from The Shop in, gallerist, Carl Freedman's garden and the ashes were exhibited at her exhibition My Major Retrospective at the White Cube in November 1993.In November 1993, Emin had her first solo show at White Cube, a contemporary art gallery in London.It was called My Major Retrospective, and was autobiographical, consisting of personal photographs, photos of her early paintings, as well as items which most artists would not consider showing in public.
In the mid-1990s, Emin had a relationship with Carl Freedman, who had been an early friend of, and collaborator with, Damien Hirst, and who had co-curated seminal Britart shows, such as Modern Medicine and Gambler. In 1994, they toured the US together, driving in a Cadillac from San Francisco to New York, and making stops en route where she gave readings from her autobiographical book Exploration of the Soul to finance the trip.
The couple spent time by the sea in Whitstable together, using a beach hut that she uprooted and turned into art in 1999 with the title The Last Thing I Said to You is Don't Leave Me Here, which was destroyed in the 2004 Momart warehouse fire.
In 1995, Freedman curated the show Minky Manky at the South London Gallery. Emin has said,
The result was her "tent" Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, which was first exhibited in the show. It was a blue tent, appliquéd with the names of everyone she has slept with. These included sexual partners, plus relatives she slept with as a child, her twin brother, and her two aborted children.
The needlework which is integral to this work was used by Emin in a number of her other pieces. This piece was later bought by Charles Saatchi and included in the successful 1997 Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy; it then toured to Berlin and New York. It, too, was destroyed by the fire in Saatchi's east London warehouse, in 2004.
Public recognition
Emin was largely unknown by the public until she appeared on a Channel 4 television programme in 1997, . The show comprised a group discussion about that year's Turner Prize and was broadcast live. Emin was drunk, slurred and swore before walking out of the interview.Two years later, in 1999, Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize herself and exhibited My Bed at the Tate Gallery.
There was considerable media attention regarding the apparently trivial and possibly unhygienic elements of the installation, such as yellow stains on the bedsheets, condoms, empty cigarette packets, and a pair of knickers with menstrual stains. The bed was presented as it had been when she had stayed in it for several days, feeling suicidal because of relationship difficulties.
Two performance artists, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, jumped onto the bed with bare torsos to "improve" the work, which they thought had not gone far enough.
In July 1999, at the height of Emin's Turner Prize fame, she created a number of monoprints drawings inspired by the public and private life of Princess Diana for a themed exhibition called Temple of Diana held at The Blue Gallery, London. Works such as They Wanted You To Be Destroyed related to Princess Diana's bulimia, while other monoprints included affectionate texts such as Love Was on Your Side and a description of Princess Diana's dress with puffy sleeves. Other drawings highlighted The things you did to help other people written next to a drawing by Emin of Diana, Princess of Wales in protective clothing walking through a minefield in Angola. Another work was a delicate sketch of a rose drawn next to the phrase "It makes perfect sence to know they killed you" referring to the conspiracy theories surrounding Princess Diana's death. Emin herself described the drawings, saying they "could be considered quite scrappy, fresh, kind of naïve looking drawings" and "It's pretty difficult for me to do drawings not about me and about someone else. But I did have a lot of ideas. They're quite sentimental I think and there's nothing cynical about it whatsoever."
Elton John collects Emin's work, as did George Michael. Michael and his partner Kenny Goss held the A Tribute To Tracey Emin exhibition in September 2007 at their Dallas-based museum, the Goss-Michael Foundation.
This was the inaugural exhibition for the gallery which displayed a variety of Emin works from a large blanket, video installations, prints, paintings and a number of neon works including a special neon piece George Loves Kenny which was the centrepiece of the exhibition, developed by Emin after she wrote an article for The Independent newspaper in February 2007 with the same title. Goss and Michael, acquired 25 works by Emin.
Other celebrities and musicians who support Emin's art include models Jerry Hall and Naomi Campbell, film star Orlando Bloom, who bought a number of Emin's works at charity auctions. Pop band Temposhark, whose lead singer collects Emin's art, named their debut album The Invisible Line, inspired by passages from Emin's book Exploration of The Soul. Rock legend Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones is a well documented friend of Emin, whose own paintings are inspired by Emin's work.
Emin was invited to Madonna's country estate Ashcombe. The singer described Emin, saying: "Tracey is intelligent and wounded and not afraid to expose herself," and, "She is provocative but she has something to say. I can relate to that." David Bowie, a childhood inspiration of Emin's, also became friends with the artist. Bowie once described Emin as "William Blake as a woman, written by Mike Leigh".
Like the George Michael and Kenny Goss neon, Emin created a unique neon work for her supermodel friend Kate Moss