Tracey Emin's Neon Confessions
Emin has explored the increasingly blurred distinction between private and public life.
Cover photo: The more of you the more I love you, 2016, neon, by Tracey Emin, Apollolaan 171, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2019). Photo by DannyWithLove.
My Bed, box frame, mattress, linens, pillows and various objects, by Tracey Emin (1998). Via Tate (cropped).
Tracey Emin at The Lighthouse Gala, at Christie’s London, England (2007). Photo by Piers Allardyce and via Wikimedia (cropped).
Born on July 3, 1963, today is the 58th birthday of British artist Tracey Emin. Her ascent coincides with the inception of reality television and social networks. Emin’s work has explored the increasingly blurred distinction between private and public life throughout the last forty years.
Emin rose to prominence in the 1980s with vulnerable and intimate works, verging on exhibitionism. Her career was launched with the ready-made installation My Bed (1998), Emin’s own messy bed in which she suffered an emotional breakdown.
While Emin has worked in a variety of mediums, she is perhaps best known for her pieces in neon, which she first produced in the early 1990s. She juxtaposes the commercial medium with confessions of her fears, memories, and desires, rendered in her own handwriting. “Neon is emotional for everybody,” Emin argues.
The more of you the more I love you, 2016, neon, by Tracey Emin, Apollolaan 171, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2019). Photo by DannyWithLove.
The more of you the more I love you, 2016, neon, by Tracey Emin, Apollolaan 171, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2019). Photo by DannyWithLove.
In part due to the #MeToo movement, Emin is more relevant than ever. She recalls, “Twenty years ago people said: ‘We don’t want to hear about her rape. We don’t want to hear about her abortion. We don’t want to hear about her loneliness. We don’t want to hear about her upbringing. We don’t want to hear about her child abuse’.” Now, Emin adds, she is free to create her autobiographical art “without being called a moaner or a whinger or a whiner or a narcissist.”
Diagnosed with bladder cancer in late 2020, Emin was forced to undergo the removal of multiple organs. “I was so happy to be alive,” she declared. The experience has inspired her new collection of work. Emin hopes to live as long as her creative idol, the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch who died at the age of 80.
Be Faithful to Your Dreams, 1998, neon and plexiglass, by Tracy Emin, at Gallerie d’Italia, Naples, Italy (2018). Photo by DannyWithLove.
You Forgot to Kiss My Soul, 2001, neon tube, by Tracey Emin, at the Stedelijk Musuem, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2019). Photo by DannyWithLove.
