TRACEY EMIN: I FOLLOWED YOU TO THE END AT WHITE CUBE BERMONDSEY
September 19, 2024 – November 10, 2024
TRACEY EMIN: I FOLLOWED
YOU TO THE END AT WHITE CUBE BERMONDSEY
September 19, 2024 –
November 10, 2024
Tracey Emin returns to
White Cube Bermondsey with her solo exhibition, ‘I followed you to the end’, a
presentation of new paintings and sculptures that journey through love and
loss, mortality and rebirth. Drawing from a recent, transformative experience,
Emin continues her exploration of life’s most profound and intimate moments,
with renewed intensity.
The exhibition celebrates
Emin’s expressive painterly vocabulary, focusing on the medium that has
occupied and engaged the artist in recent years. Deft, impulsive strokes
capture figures in the throes of becoming, while a palette of carmine, ivory,
deep blues and black temper the volatility of physical and emotional states
with intervals of contemplation and stillness. Serving as a fulcrum for the
exhibition’s psychical journey, the titular painting I Followed you to the
end (2024) elicits the plaintive anguish wrought from the complexities of
love. Bathed in a tempest of red and black, the outline of a solitary female
figure is framed by a handwritten exhortation to the lovers that have
mistreated her: ‘You made me like this. All of you – you – you men that I so
insanely loved so much. You are the ones that made me feel so alone. All of you
– each of you in your individual way. I – I – I – was at fault to keep loving
you. Like a fool I followed love to the end. Like the sad haunted soul that I
am, I followed you to the end’.
From this wounded indictment, tensions emerge in other works, where the
mourning of lost love is countered by a visceral drive for self-preservation.
In the diptych My Dead Body – A Trace of Life (2024), the female subject lies
supine, her pelvis thrust upward while her head founders beneath a crimson
tide. This horizon line extends to the second canvas, where a passage avows: ‘I
don’t want to have sex because my body feels dead’. Informed, in no small
measure, by the artist’s recent confrontation with life-threatening illness,
the work also speaks frankly of Emin’s personal reckoning with mortality. The
private spaces that Emin’s subjects inhabit – beds and baths – transform into
sepulchral vessels, securing the figure within. In I Kept
Crying (2024), the figure, shrouded in a cascade of red paint, reclines in
a bath that might also be read as a burial ground, with the taps transfiguring
into crucifixes. Elsewhere, allusions to Charon, the ferryman of the Greek
underworld, emerge in the red sails of Time to Go (2024) – a motif
that, like many others, surfaced from the subconscious during the creative act.
In several of the works, the veil between life and death is thin and permeable,
a diaphanous threshold through which the artist’s figures appear to make
contact with the Beyond. Likewise, Emin’s instinctive process involves veiling
and unveiling: she often paints an image on canvas only to obscure it later
with additional layers of white, leaving behind a spectral impression of the
over writ form, as can be seen in Take me to Heaven (2024). Here, the
subject assumes a tranquil repose, as if drifting into another realm. To the
left, a pale lavender presence – conjured through this technique – appears
beside the protagonist, serving as a proxy for the artist’s deceased mother.
Depicted within a room adorned with blue floral-patterned wallpaper, the
serenity of the scene is abruptly ruptured by a violent gush of red from the
subject’s torso, wrenching the transcendent moment back to the immediacy of the
present.
Similar decorative motifs appear in works such as The End of
Love, More Dreaming and Our World (all 2024), which draw
inspiration from the intricate designs of Turkish rugs collected by the artist,
who is of Turkish heritage herself. This patterning represents a different form
of mark-making, one led by a meditative impulse as opposed to the frenetic and
urgent fervour that often characterises her paintings. Influenced by the
evocative interior domestic scenes of Edvard Munch, the settings within these
compositions become as integral to the narrative as the figures themselves.
Autobiographical markers are woven throughout, as in The
Bridge (2024), where an undulating landscape – insinuated by the
silhouette of a sofa – symbolically connects the artist’s two hometowns of
Margate and London, with the sofa posts evoking the structural supports of the
Medway Bridge. Throughout the exhibition, the artist’s faithful familiars – her
cats – reappear across both the large canvases and small-scale paintings,
either gathered around the solitary figure or standing as stoic sentinels,
silently keeping watch. In The End of Love, they serve as surrogate
subjects, filling the void left by the stained silhouette of the two lovers,
now erased and absent from the bed.
Emin approaches her paintings without preliminary sketches or a predetermined
vision, engaging with the canvas as though it were a medium of divination,
coaxing hidden truths to the surface through the process of painting. The
images that emerge function as an interface, to resurrect former versions of
the self; to revisit defining events from her life; to weave together the
spectrum of her experience into an ever-present moment. A recurring motif in
Emin’s recent work is intimately tied to the artist’s bodily reality. Following
a diagnosis of aggressive bladder cancer in 2020, Emin underwent major surgery
to remove the affected organ and a substantial portion of the surrounding
abdominal organs. During the procedure, her ureters were rerouted to a
surgically constructed passage in her abdomen. A candid video, filmed by the
artist herself and displayed in the gallery’s auditorium, reveals in vivid
detail the stoma she now lives with – a pulsing, sunset-red orifice that may be
variously identified in the surgent valves, halos and potent reds that
punctuate Emin’s paintings.
Though painting has become increasingly central to Emin’s practice in recent
years, she has continued to create sculpture, as evidenced by the two new
bronze works featured in this exhibition. The smaller
counterpart, Ascension (2024), presents a female torso in repose and
echoes the figure depicted in My Dead Body – A Trace of Life, although
mounted on the wall in a manner reminiscent of a crucifixion. The monumental
sculpture, I Followed You To The End (2024), commands the central
space of the South Galleries. At first glance, its form appears abstract, with
textured ridges and dimpled impressions suggestive of a rugged landscape.
Navigating around and drawing back from the work, the lower anatomy of a figure
reveals itself, with sprawled legs ambiguously parted as tender invitation or
brutal subjugation. With its deeply worked surfaces directly capturing the
imprints from moulding by the artist’s hand, the sculpture evokes a sensuous
intimacy that belies its vast scale.
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I FOLLOWED
YOU TO THE END, 2024
Acrylic on
Canvas
Dimensions:
182.2 x 120.1 cm | 71 3/4 x 47 5/16 in.
Image Credit: © Tracey Emin. All Rights
Reserved, DACS 2024.
I FOLLOWED
YOU TO THE END, 2024
Patinated
Bronze
Edition 1 of
3
Dimensions:
690 x 393 x 260 cm | 271 5/8 x 154 3/4 x 102 3/8 in.
Image Credit: © Tracey Emin. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024.
TAKE ME TO HEAVEN, 2024
Acrylic on
Canvas
Dimensions:
203.1 x 280.3 cm | 79 15/16 x 110 3/8 in.
Image Credit: © Tracey Emin. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024.
ANOTHER PLACE
TO LIVE, 2024
Acrylic on
Canvas
Dimensions:
203.1 x 280.3 cm | 79 15/16 x 110 3/8 in.
Image Credit: © Tracey Emin. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024.
NOT FUCKABLE, 2024
Acrylic on
Canvas
Image Credit: © Tracey Emin. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024.
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I DID NOTHING WRONG, 2024
ASCENSION,
2024
Patinated
Bronze
Edition 1 of
3
Dimensions:
72.5 x 36 x 23.5 cm | 28 9/16 x 14 3/16 x 9 1/4 in.
Image Credit: © Tracey Emin. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024.
MORE LOVE
THAN I CAN REMEMBER, 2024
Acrylic on
Canvas
Dimensions:
182 x 214.2 cm | 71 5/8 x 84 5/16 in.
Image Credit: © Tracey Emin. All Rights
Reserved, DACS 2024.
BLOOD – BLOOD
AND MORE BLOOD, 2024
Acrylic on
Canvas
Image Credit: © Tracey Emin. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024.
THE END OF
LOVE, 2024
Acrylic on
Canvas
Dimensions:
202.9 x 280.2 cm | 79 7/8 x 110 5/16 in.
Image Credit: © Tracey Emin. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024.
I KEPT
CRYING, 2024
Acrylic on
Canvas
Dimensions:
122.3 x 122.3 cm | 48 1/8 x 48 1/8 in.
Image Credit: © Tracey Emin. All Rights Reserved,
DACS 2024.
I WAITED SO
LONG – TOO LONG, 2024
Acrylic on
Canvas
Dimensions:
152.2 x 152.2 cm | 59 15/16 x 59 15/16 in.
Image Credit: © Tracey Emin. All Rights
Reserved, DACS 2024.
ABOUT TRACEY EMIN
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.
The playful title of Emin’s first solo exhibition, My Major
Retrospective 1963–1993, suggests the artist felt, despite being at the
beginning of her career, significant things had already happened. Her obsessive
assemblage of personal memorabilia included tiny photographs of her art school
paintings that she’d destroyed, a ‘photographic graveyard’ that revealed an
admiration for paintings by Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch. She details this
‘emotional suiside’ in Tracey Emin’s CV Cunt Vernacular (1997), among
several early video works that give further insight into her formation as an
artist, highlighting moments of epiphany through the use of first-person
narrative. ‘I realised there was the essence of creativity, that moment of
conception,’ she says in How It Feels (1996), a pivotal film in which
she tells the story of her abortion. ‘The whole being of everything… it had to
be about where it was really coming from’. Speaking to camera while walking
through the streets of London, she concludes that conceptual art, as an act of
reproduction, is inseparable from the artist’s inner life. Developing this
connection, the haunting film Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead
Children (1998) shows the artist on the pier near Munch’s house, naked and
prostrate in the foetal position, the dawn rising over the water as she lifts
her head and screams – a guttural response to great painter’s iconic image.
In 1998, Emin created My Bed, an uncensored presentation of her most
personal habitat. The double bed has become abstracted from function as it sits
on the gallery floor, in conversation with art history and a stage for life
events: birth, sleep, sex, depression, illness, death. The accumulation of real
objects (slippers, condoms, cigarettes, empty bottles, underwear) on and around
the unmade bed builds a portrait of the artist with bracing matter-of-factness,
defying convention to exhibit what most people would keep private. The work
gained international attention as part of the Turner Prize, entering Emin into
public consciousness. Another work that became a byword for her art of
disclosure was the sculpture Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963−1995 (1995,
destroyed 2004), where the names of all those she had ever shared a bed with –
friends, lovers and family – were sewn on the inside of a tent, a crawl-space
that invites the viewer to reflect on their own inventory.
Explicitly feminist, and acknowledging the influence of her friend and
collaborator Louise Bourgeois, Emin’s choice of medium is integral to the story
she tells. In hand-embroidered blankets and quilts, traditionally associated
with women’s work, she pierces the visual field with words, combining scraps of
different material with uneven stitching to spell out statements whose syntax
and spelling remain uncorrected. With titles such as Mad Tracey from
Margate. Everyone’s been there, (1997) or Hellter Fucking Skelter (2001),
they register the artist’s acute sensitivity to the views of those around her
and give a riposte, just as the medium is a riposte to the classification of
fine art, for centuries dominated by male artists. As she herself became
newsworthy, both nationally and internationally, Emin used the publicity to
prick other forms of decorum in the professional art world – such as never
over-explaining. In longer form, her memoir, Strangeland (2005)
offers an account of her journey to becoming ‘a fucked, crazy, anorexic-alcoholic-childless,
beautiful woman. I never dreamt it would be like this.’ The text is riddled
with spelling mistakes that challenge the form and carry through a sense of
unfiltered process, as was also the case with her long-running newspaper column
for The Independent (2005–09), in which she narrated her weekly
goings-on under the title ‘My Life in a Column’.
Emin’s ongoing series of neons features snatches of text in her recognisable
slanted handwriting, elevating fleeting thoughts and feelings as aphorisms: You
touch my Soul (2020), I Longed For you (2019) or I don’t
Believe in Love but I believe in you (2012). Her formulation of statements
in the second person has the effect of placing the viewer squarely in the
situation, and can encapsulate an entire romance in a pithy phrase, as
in I want my time with You (2018), a twenty-metre-wide neon that
greets passengers at London’s St Pancras Station. A critical part of her
practice since the 1990s, the neons evoke the seafront lights of Margate, latent
with the sense of dusk and faded glamour. Her birthplace is an abiding subject;
it resurfaces in large-scale sculptures, where reclaimed wood and found
materials are assembled in jagged structures that allude to the beach, pier,
huts and tide markers. Margate’s famous theme park ‘Dreamland’ is referred to
in several works, among them Self-Portrait (2001), which recreates the
pleasure ground’s helter-skelter, and It’s Not the Way I want to
Die (2005), which recalls the undulating roller-coaster in rickety, worn wood,
fragile to the point of collapse. Margate is ‘part of me’, Emin says, and while
looking back she is now looking to the future with the establishment of TKE
Studios, a new art school and artists’ studios.
Questions of mortality and the centrality of the female reproductive body
drive The Mother (2021), one of Emin’s most significant public sculptures.
Permanently sited next to the new Munch Museum, Oslo, it marks the death of her
own mother, and brings her lifelong admiration for Munch full circle. Fifteen
tonnes of bronze standing nine metres high, this woman with ‘her legs open to
the Fjord’ is visible from afar over land and water, a monument to the female
figure as protector without compromising on her vulnerability or eroticism. By
contrast, Baby Things, Emin’s accurate rendering of children’s tiny lost
shoes and clothes in bronze, was installed as if by chance outside the British
Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007) and around Folkestone Triennial (2008),
intimate tokens that might inadvertently provoke a range of reactions, from
fear for those we love most, to the indifference with which we treat a
discarded object.
Most recently, Emin’s work has been charged by the seriousness of her medical
situation, since in 2020 she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Self-portraits
taken on her camera phone in bed find the artist facing her ‘crippling’
insomnia in the small hours, and in recovery from extensive surgery. Her
paintings of the nude figure have a tempestuous energy. Emin’s graphic line, by
turn delicate or vigorous, imparts a sense of urgency; with each abandoned and
assertive gesture, she is flaying herself open. Drips and obliterations point
to the fluidity of the body, as it fluctuates between joy and suffering on its
journey between birth and death. Explosions of colour allude to a self that is
overcome by feeling and triumphing in sheer sensuality.
Tracey Emin was born in 1963 in London. She currently lives and works between
London, the South of France, and Margate, UK. Emin has exhibited extensively
including major exhibitions at Royal Academy of Arts, London (2020); Musée
d’Orsay, Paris (2019); Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, France (2017);
Leopold Museum, Vienna (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2013); Museo
de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2012); Turner Contemporary, Margate,
UK (2012); Hayward Gallery, London (2011); Kunstmuseum Bern (2009); Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2008); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo,
Malaga, Spain (2008); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2003); and
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002).
In 2007 Emin represented Great Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale and her
installation My Bed has been included in ‘In Focus’ displays at Tate
Britain with Francis Bacon (2015), Tate Liverpool with William Blake and also
at Turner Contemporary, Margate alongside JMW Turner (2017). In 2011, Emin was
appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and in
2012 was made Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for
her contributions to the visual arts.
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