The Many Lives of Tracey Emin

Vicki Morris reviews 'Tracey Emin: A Second Life' (Tate Modern, until 31 August 2026)

‘Through painting, video, textiles, neons, writing, sculpture, and installation, Emin continues to challenge boundaries, using the female body as a powerful tool to explore passion, pain, and healing.’

‘Using the female body…?’ A strange choice of words in the exhibition notes, but Tracey Emin's own, presumably, or at least she signed off on the copy. This is an exhibition focused not on depictions of the joyful things but on the painful things in Emin's life, and any woman – any person – could relate to a lot of it.

Examining some more visceral aspects of life in a female body – sex, menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, illness, surgery – this is Emin's self-portraiture done when she or anyone would be at their least pretty.

There are moving reflections on pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion. Even when abortion, for example, is not a happy choice, Emin espouses reproductive rights. There are her paintings of women's – her – naked body, seen from all the awkward angles. They are full of messy life and movement. There are reflections on sex and on sexual violence, which are horribly entangled as we all know.

But the pieces here are not just about her body but also about what one does with a body, including working. Emin's work is very different from the work most of us do, but it's her work, the profession of artist. It appears here in the form of Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, a reconstructed studio from Stockholm, where she stayed for three weeks in 1996 regaining her powers as a painter.

And there is her personal environment, her home town Margate, in a large, enjoyable sculpture based on the rollercoaster at Dreamland. The story about this piece is particularly interesting and we all probably have some local icon where we grew up that is woven into our – weirder – dreams.

There's little overt evidence of partners but some lovers; children are there at least in the absence; there is a lot of domesticity but without any housework.

The exhibition title refers to Emin in her thirties when she was successful and she liked her body and the way she looked but describes herself as leading rather a shallow life and Emin today after radical cancer surgery, older, possibly wiser, and sometimes in a lot of pain. I used not to like Tracey Emin – for a long time I felt channeled to disparage her unashamed focus on herself. So you slept with X number of people, so what, I've slept with…! A (male) friend pointed out to me that ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995’, also known as ‘The Tent’, includes… her grandmother. (Emin sold the piece for £12,000, the advertising magnate Charles Saatchi bought it from the original owner for £40,000; it was destroyed in an art warehouse fire before he could sell it on for God knows how much.)

‘My Bed’ is in the exhibition. It made a huge stir at the time, 1998, which now seems completely bizarre – it's just an installation, with fairly mild content compared to vast amounts of largely male-made art of the previous century! Two otherwise probably inoffensive performance artists had a topless pillow fight on the bed and called it ‘Two Naked Men Jump into Tracey's Bed’ – bravo, sirs.

We can thank Emin for having made large, usually hidden parts of women's lives objects for contemplation, discussion, and depiction.

Nowadays we can read it in a whole new way again as an anticipatory rebuke to the curated images of self and lifestyle content produced by influencers and other egoists – no crumpled tissues to be seen. You might not enjoy it, but Tracey Emin's work is at least real.

It's a credit to Emin that she now lives and works in Margate, Kent, where she escaped from along with her painful childhood and teenage experiences of racism and misogyny to go and live her artist's life in London. Now, she is probably Margate's best ambassador and citizen, opening studios for artists starting out, renovating buildings, etc. The Emin branding of the town can get overdone, but it's still a better legacy than many artists who have made it big as she has.