Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin, CBE, RA is an English artist known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. Emin was raped at the age of 13 while living in Margate, Kent. Her work has been analysed within the context of early adolescent and childhood abuse, as well as sexual assault. In December 2011, she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy.

About Tracey Emin in brief

Summary Tracey EminTracey Emin, CBE, RA is an English artist known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. Emin produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Emin was raped at the age of 13 while living in Margate, Kent. Her work has been analysed within the context of early adolescent and childhood abuse, as well as sexual assault. 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. In the mid-1990s, Emin had a relationship with Damien Hirst, who had been an early collaborator and friend of her early collaborator, Carl Freedman. In 1993, Emin opened a shop with fellow artist Sarah Lucas, called The Retro Shop at 103 Bethnal Green Road, which sold T-shirts and ashtrays with Damien’s picture stuck to the bottom. In November 1994, she 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 of her, photos of her family and friends. In 1997, her work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, a tent appliquedd with the names of everyone the artist had ever shared a bed with was shown at Charles Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition held at theRoyal Academy in London The same year, she gained considerable media exposure when she swore repeatedly in a state of drunkenness on a live discussion programme called The Death of Painting on British television.

In 1999, EminHad her first Solo exhibition in the United States at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, entitled Every Part of Me’s Bleeding. Later that year, Emin was a Turner Prize nominee 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. She has lectured about the links between creativity and autobiography, and the role of subjectivity and personal histories in constructing art. Emin’s influences included Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, and for a time she studied philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. In 1987, Emin moved to London to study at Royal College of Art, where in 1989 she obtained an MA in painting. 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 Art is Friendship, which is in the Royal college of Art Collection, a series of works from her early work that were not destroyed were displayed as part of My Major retrospective in 1993, called Retro Retrospective. Emin shares a paternal great-grandfather with her second cousin Meral Hussein-Ece, Baroness Hussein- ece, and is of Turkish Cypriot descent.