ART CITIES:London-Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin moved to London in 1989 to study at the Royal College of Art, where she first came into contact with, and exhibited alongside, artists such as Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst. The group later became known as the Young British Artists. Though the group as a whole was subversive, bold, and unafraid of attracting controversy/criticism, Emin in particular gained a “bad girl” reputation and lodged herself in the cultural consciousness of the UK.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: White Cube Gallery Archive
Tracey Emin’s work is often referred to as confessional, for she uses her own personal history as the subject for her artwork. She has used her own body as medium in self-portraits and performances. Her artworks enact self-mapping and self-commemorating through the possible healing and spiritual aspect of art.The exhibition “A Fortnight of Tears” includes sculpture, neon, painting, film, photography and drawing by Tracey Emin, all focusing on the artist’s own memories and emotions arising from loss, pathos, anger and love. The exhibition centres around Emin’s own pain, including her mother’s death, with works shown in the North Galleries evoking states of bereavement, mourning and enduring love. Set against the melancholic grey tone of the walls, “I Could Feel You” (2018), “Bye Bye Mum” (2018), “I Prayed” (2017) and “Can you hear me” (2017) all depict grief. In a new film screened alongside these paintings, the camera pans slowly across a table towards a wooden box placed at one end, bathed in an ethereal light. Emin recalls the overwhelming weight of her mother’s ashes as she carried them back to her home: “I carried her ashes across the street – trying not to cry, trying not to think. It somehow felt wrong like I was stealing something – like I was a thief”. The celebration of motherhood and the female form reappears in “The Mother” (2017), this bronze sculpture relates to Emin’s public commission for Oslo’s Museum Island, which will be permanently installed beside the Edvard Munch Museum from late spring 2020. A kneeling nude, gazing intently upon an absent form cradled in her palms, she is a profound symbol of femininity and refuge. Two further sculptures portray a female figure lying face down or curled up in vulnerable and eroticised poses, with delicately modelled limbs elongated, hands clenched by her head or between her legs. Also on presentation is a new photographic series by Emin titled “Insomnia”, selected from thousands of self-portraits taken by the artist on her iPhone over the last couple of years, these images spontaneously capture prolonged periods of restlessness and inner turmoil”. The endnote to the exhibition is “How It Feels” (1996), a pivotal early film in Emin’s career. Here the artist, seen walking through the streets of London, recounts the ordeal of her first abortion in 1990 and how through that crisis she came to the revelation that art could not be made for art’s sake it had to be intrinsically bound up with her own life.
Info: White Cube Gallery, 144-152 Bermondsey Street, London, Duration: 6/2-7/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, http://whitecube.com
