Artists

The feminist and post-modernist Artist Tracey Karima Emin was born in 1963 in Croydon, a borough of London. She studied fashion and visual arts and in 1989 participated in a master’s degree in painting at the Royal College of Art in London. In the 1990s she decided to open a shop in the English Capital where she sold products (such as T-shirts with painted slogans or ashtrays of Damien Hirst’s face) created by herself and her friend Sarah Lucas.

 

In the works created by this Artist, themes such as love, passion, loss and pain emerge, enveloping the viewer into a highly emotional state. This can first be seen in the famous neons, characterised by scursive writing and a recognisable grammar of their own. They are phrases written in green, red, blue, white or pink that stand out because of their strong and at the same time fragile character - two aspects that we also find in human relationships. The strength of those installations remains only thanks to those very thin tubes in which the neon flows, but it would take very little to destroy everything, just like it can happen in human relationships. Frank and unfiltered, Tracey Emin draws naked female bodies (often self-portraits) that represent her stormy past; they refer to when, at the age of only thirteen, she was raped by a group of people and then at eighteen she suffered another rape. In addition to neons and paintings, the artist also dedicates herself to sculpture, installations and photography.

 

Emin’s works are exhibited in numerous institutions such as: Royal Academy of Arts, London; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, France; Leopold Museum, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires; Turner Contemporary, Margate, United Kingdom; Hayward Gallery, London; Kunstmuseum Bern; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Center for Contemporary Art, Malaga, Spain; New South Wales Art Gallery, Sydney; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.