Exhibitions

Step into the tender, confessional world of Tracey Emin

London, United Kingdom

Step into the tender, confessional world of Tracey Emin — where pain, love, shame, survival and healing become art.

Step into the tender, confessional world of Tracey Emin

Image credit

Tracey Emin My Bed 1998 © Tracey Emin. Photo credit: Courtesy The Saatchi Gallery, London / Photograph by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

Meet the artist

The Movement

Art Installation, Contemporary Art

ArtLovers Tip

A must-see London exhibition: raw, vulnerable, difficult, life-affirming — Tracey Emin not as scandal, but as one of the most powerful autobiographical artists of our time. Visit time / Density: Dense and emotionally intense. Allow at least 75–90 minutes. If you want to read, absorb the videos and move slowly through the later works, give it 2 hours.

Exhibition Highlights - What you'll see

This exhibition brings together Tracey Emin’s career-defining works alongside pieces never shown to the public before. Across painting, video, textiles, neon, writing, sculpture and installation, Emin turns autobiography into a raw artistic language: the female body, desire, trauma, abortion, illness, love, loneliness, survival and repair.

You’ll encounter the artist who became famous in the 1990s with works such as My Bed, a Turner Prize-nominated installation that forced the public to ask what could count as art — and what kind of female experience was allowed to be seen inside a museum.

But A Second Life is not only about the scandalous Tracey Emin of the YBA years. It also foregrounds her recent work, shaped by illness, mortality, recovery and a new commitment to painting. Tate describes the exhibition as expanding Emin’s story and celebrating her raw, confessional approach to love, trauma and autobiography.

Worth the trip

Because Emin’s radical honesty feels more relevant than ever.

In a culture that constantly turns private life into content, Emin reminds us that confession can still be serious, risky and transformative. Her work is not “oversharing” for attention; it is a lifelong attempt to give form to what is difficult to say: shame, heartbreak, sexual violence, grief, illness, survival, tenderness.

For Artlovers, this is worth the trip because it is one of those exhibitions that asks you not only to look, but to feel. It shows how art can turn a wounded life into a language that others can recognise.

How to experience it

Do not visit this exhibition looking for distance.

Emin’s work is intimate, direct and sometimes uncomfortable. Let it be. Start with the early pieces, but don’t stay trapped in the 1990s controversy. The deepest part may be the later work: the paintings, the body after illness, the idea of continuing after everything has changed.

This is not just a retrospective. It is an exhibition about having a second life — and what it costs to make one.

London, United Kingdom

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