Tracey Emin at Tate Modern: Looking Back, Going Forward

A major retrospective of Tracey Emin is on view at Tate Modern through August 31, 2026. Titled A Second Life, the exhibition revisits an artist whose work has always been closely tied to her own biography, yet never limited to it. 

Emin was born in 1963 in Croydon and grew up in Margate, a seaside town that continues to surface in her work. he has often described her childhood as marked by both a sense of freedom and sudden instability: her father left, the family hotel went bankrupt, and the household quickly fell into poverty. At thirteen, she was raped. Later came a series of experiences—abortions, unstable relationships, breakdowns—that would become part of her artistic vocabulary. 

In the early 1990s, shortly after graduating from the Royal College of Art, Emin began to gain visibility in London’s art scene.  Together with Sarah Lucas, she opened The Shop in Shoreditch—a mix of studio, storefront, and informal meeting place. At the time, the neighborhood had little of the polish it would later acquire, and the project matched that vibe — it was direct and deliberately unrefined. During the day, they produced and sold handmade objects; at night, artists and friends gathered there. The place itself was a statement: art is part of everyday life, it’s rooted in it, and grows out of it. 

It was around this time that art dealer and curator Jay Jopling invited her to make a show at White Cube. Emin called it My Major Retrospective — a title that was half joke, half promise of what was to come. Tracey Emin brought together objects from her own life — diaries, photographs, family memorabilia, small drawings, and images of earlier paintings she had destroyed. She made those paintings soon after art school, quickly realizing they were too academic and did not feel like her own work.

Tracey Emin: A Second Life Tate Modern. © Tracey Emin with It's Not the Way I Want to Die 2005 and I needed you to love Me 2023.

She attracted wider attention with the piece Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), a tent, embroidered with the names of 102 people—lovers, friends, family members. The title suggests disclosure, but the work itself complicates it. It does not explain who is who. It does not organize the names into categories. We see traces of the artist’s life, but we are left to imagine the stories behind them. The work cannot be seen in A Second Life, as it was destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004, and Tracey Emin chose not to recreate it, feeling she was no longer the same person she had been when she first made it.

When the work was shown in the 1997 exhibition Sensation, organized by collector Charles Saatchi, it brought Emin to a much wider public and placed her among the most debated artists of her generation. The exhibition gathered artists associated with the Young British Artists and quickly became one of the most controversial art events of the decade. Works on view included Damien Hirst’s animals preserved in formaldehyde and the Chapman brothers’ deliberately unsettling sculptural figures. Some critics dismissed the exhibition as sensationalist, while others saw it as a sign that contemporary art was expanding its boundaries and confronting subjects previously considered unacceptable.

In this atmosphere, Emin’s work attracted attention for different reasons. She brought into the gallery personal experiences — relationships, vulnerability, trauma — things that are usually kept private.

Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), featured at A Second Life, recounts Emin’s youth in Margate and leads to a dance competition where boys from her town chant “slug” at her after her sexual abuse had become known in the small community. The work ends with Emin dancing alone, transforming a painful memory into a moment of self-assertion.

Tracey Emin: A Second Life. Tate Modern installation view of Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995)

My Bed (1998), shown at the Turner Prize exhibition in 1999 now presented again at Tate Modern, became one of her most widely known works and a defining image of her early career. The unmade bed, surrounded by everyday empty bottles, cigarette packets, stained sheets, worn underwear, used condoms, and personal belongings has often been described as raw or confessional. But what matters is not only what it shows, but what it does: it takes something temporary and fixes it. It relocates it. It turns it into something that can be looked at over time. Today, Emin herself has described it as a kind of time capsule, belonging to a version of herself that no longer exists.

Another key work is The Last of the Gold (2002), a monumental quilted blanket nearly ten feet high, made from fragments of a gold curtain that once hung in Emin’s childhood home. The work is her attempt to process the trauma of her abortion, giving it material form and a silent voice. Across the lower half, Emin stitched 26 handwritten notes describing what she calls the “A to Z of abortion”. Some lines read like words she might have needed to hear at the time: “You may feel in a state of euphoria from the relief, be careful as depression may follow.”

Language, in Emin’s work, rarely stabilizes meaning. Her neon pieces, written in her own handwriting, are a good example. Phrases such as “I want my time with you” or “You forgot to kiss my soul” appear direct, almost too direct, but once placed in space they begin to shift. Are they addressed to someone? Are they internal? Are they past or present? The works don’t resolve these questions. They hold them open.

Tracey Emin: A Second Life. Tate Modern installation view with My Bed ,1998 and It’s Not me That’s Crying its my Soul, 2001

In Emin’s later work, personal experience moves from memory into the body itself. After her mother died in 2016 following cancer — an illness Emin herself faced a few years later — grief entered the work in a new way. It can be felt in I Was Too Young to Be Carrying Your Ashes (2017–18), where blood-red brushstrokes run down the canvas and stain a figure clutching a box of ashes, turning mourning into something immediate and physical. 

In Ascension (2024), shown at Tate Modern, the bronze figure reflects Emin’s own experience of cancer and major surgery. The body appears both fragile and upright, marked by vulnerability yet refusing collapse. The exhibition also includes photographs in which Emin shows the stoma she now lives with, revealing the altered body. 

Outside Tate Modern, the bronze sculpture I Followed You Till the End (2023) places a vulnerable yet unyielding body in open space, visible to all. Once again, Emin refuses to separate the private from the public. And yet, this exposure of vulnerability is “a true celebration of living,” a moment to “look back and go forward,” as Tracey Emin has described her retrospective at Tate Modern.