Tracey Emin will open her largest ever exhibition on the Tate Trendy subsequent spring, showcasing her greatest artworks from a 40-year profession.
A Second Life will embody a few of Emin’s most well-known works, together with the headline-grabbing and Turner prize-nominated My Mattress, from 1998, alongside never-before-seen items.
“I’m very excited about having a show at Tate Modern,” Emin mentioned. “For me it’s one of the greatest international contemporary art museums in the world and it’s here in London. I feel this show … will be a benchmark for me. A moment in my life when I look back and go forward. A true celebration of living.”
Emin, most well-known for Everybody I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (The Tent) and My Mattress, has opened her personal artwork faculty and launched into a brand new physique of labor since she was recognized with aggressive bladder most cancers 5 years in the past.
The exhibition will chart Emin’s work from her “first life” by to her second, post-illness and surgical procedure. The confessional visible artist has spoken candidly about surviving most cancers, the surgical procedure she underwent and the way she now has a stoma (a gap in her stomach) and depends on a urostomy bag to gather her urine.
“I am really happy that I didn’t die and I am around to see this exhibition,” Emin mentioned earlier this 12 months. “I was there at the opening of the Tate Modern in 2000 – and at the time it felt like the most exciting thing that could ever possibly happen to London. You judge a city by its art,” she added in celebration of the gallery’s twenty fifth birthday.
The survey exhibition will deliver collectively greater than 90 works together with portray, video, textile, neon, sculpture and set up, demonstrating Emin’s “uncompromising confessional approach to sharing experiences of love, trauma and personal growth”.
The Tate Trendy mentioned: “Emin’s commitment to unapologetic self-expression has transformed our understanding of what art can be and continues to influence contemporary art today, using the female body to explore passion, pain and healing.
“Spanning her extraordinary 40-year practice – from seminal installations made in the 1990s, to recent paintings and bronzes going on display for the first time – A Second Life marks the most significant exhibition of Emin’s career, tracing the key life events that have shaped her journey and transformation.”
The exhibition will start by presenting works from Emin’s first solo exhibition at White Dice with a collection of tiny pictures of her artwork faculty work from the Eighties which she destroyed following a troublesome interval of her life. It is going to embody the documentary Why I By no means Grew to become a Dancer about her teenage years in Margate and different works centred across the seaside city the place Emin now affords rent-free area to artwork college students.
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The exhibition may also tackle Emin’s experiences of sexual assault and abortion. Proven publicly for the primary time, the 2002 quilt The Final of the Gold is emblazoned with an “A to Z of abortion”, offering recommendation for ladies going through related conditions, the Tate Trendy mentioned.
Two seminal installations – Exorcism of the Final Portray I Ever Made and My Mattress – may also function earlier than the exhibition explores Emin’s expertise of most cancers, surgical procedure and incapacity with the 2024 bronze sculpture Ascension and stills from a brand new documentary displaying the stoma that she lives with.
Emin, who was given a damehood within the king’s birthday honours checklist final 12 months for her providers to artwork, is one among Britain’s most acclaimed artists, a member of the Younger British Artists motion of the Eighties, a Turner prize nominee, and a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.
Tracey Emin: A Second Life is on on the Tate Trendy, London, 26 February to 30 August 2026
