at home: Artists in Conversation | Tracey Emin
Conversation
March 11, 2022
Tracey Emin, artist, in conversation with Martina Droth, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, YCBA
at home: Artists in Conversation
Join us for lively and inspiring conversations with some of today’s most notable artists. at home: Artists in Conversation brings together curators and artists to discuss various artistic practices and insights into their work.
About Tracey Emin
Born in London in 1963, Emin is a British artist known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. She received a Fine Art degree from Maidstone College of Art in Kent and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London. In 2007, she represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale and was also elected a Royal Academician by the Royal Academy that same year. In 2011, Emin became the Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts and in 2013 she was appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts.
Emin works in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, film, photography, neon text, and sewn appliqué. Her work explores complex personal situations and ideas of self-representation. Some of her influences include the work of Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele. In 1999, Emin was a Turner Prize nominee for her piece My Bed, in which she transported her own bed into the gallery space that she spent four days in, during what she refers to as "a complete absolute breakdown."
Emin has exhibited extensively including solo exhibitions at Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2019); Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, France (2017); Leopold Museum, Vienna (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2013); Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2012); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2012); Hayward Gallery, London (2011); Kunstmuseum Bern (2009); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2008); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Malaga, Spain (2008); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2003); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002). In 2018, she unveiled her City of Sydney permanent public art commission, The Distance of Your Heart (2018) as well as her piece I Want My Time With You (2018), at St. Pancras International in London, a piece that was suspended from the station’s Victorian glass roof.
Emin has also exhibited her work in a series of acclaimed dialogues with past masters she admires, such as Tracey Emin, My Bed / JMW Turner, Turner Contemporary, Margate (2017); In Focus: Tracey Emin and William Blake, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2016); Tracey Emin and Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, London (2015); and Where I Want to Go, with Egon Schiele, The Leopold Museum, Vienna (2015). In November 2020, she opened a major solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The exhibition, entitled The Loneliness of the Soul, then toured to Oslo's new Munch Museum in October 2021. The artist’s largest artwork to date, The Mother, is due to be unveiled as a permanent public commission for Oslo’s Museum Island. Emin currently lives and works in London, the South of France and Margate, UK.
This program is presented through the generosity of the Terry F. Green 1969 Fund for British Art and Culture.
