ART-PRESENTATION: Tracey Emin, I Cried Because I Love You
Tracey Emin in 2014 had hung a heart-shaped neon sign with the message “my heart is with you always” on the front of The Peninsula hotel in Hong Kong. It might have given the impression that this former wild child who made “Everyone I have Ever Slept With 1963-95” aka “The Tent” and “My Bed”, had lost her zing.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive
The exhibition “I Cried Because I Love You” is held concurrently at two separate Galleries in Hong Kong: White Cube and Lehmann Maupin, and is the artist’s first solo exhibition in China. The artist explores ideas of narrative disclosure, often drawing on subjects that are intimately bound up with her own biography. Drawing from personal experience, she frequently uses her own body as source material, recollecting memories or emotions that are vividly honest and candid but also familiar and universal. The Royal College of Art graduate is now the Royal Academy’s professor of drawing, its second female professor since its founding in the 18th Century and one of Britain’s wealthiest and most respected artists. The exhibition evokes a self-reflexive moment in the artist’s life, reflecting on the pain of loneliness, sexual desire, and the bitterness of separation. There are traditional sketches of the female nude that may be self-portraits, and an embroidered work where she has used needle and thread like a paint brush. She also presents works made with neon lights and bronze. A narrative running through the exhibition focuses on a large stone located in an olive grove just outside Emin’s studio in the South of France. In a series of drawings Emin recollects a marriage ceremony that took place there last Summer, where she wore a white shroud originally made to adorn her father’s body at his funeral. For Emin, her union with the stone, an immovable and solid form, becomes a metaphor for stability and enduring love. Tracey Emin has described her practice as being about “Rites of passage, of time and age, and the simple realisation that we are always alone”. Repeatedly turning to self-portraiture and the classical nude, her work is the result of an intense process of self-discovery. In her new paintings Emin works from photographs of herself, in order to honestly convey and reflect on the physicality of her own body as the years pass. Emerging from layers of application, obliteration and reworking, she uses a minimal palette built-up to outline the body, allowing the practices of drawing and painting to seamlessly merge.
Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 407 Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 21/3-21/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-19:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com & White Cube Hong Kong, 50 Connaught Road, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 21/3-21/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, During Art Basel Hong Kong the gallery will be open: 21/3 9:30-19:00, 22-25/3 10:00-19:00, http://whitecube.com
