Dame Tracey Emin DBE RA

Tracey Emin was born in Croydon, south London, but grew up in Margate, Kent. In 1987, Emin moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, where in 1989 she obtained an MA in painting. Prior to this she had also studied at the Medway College of Design (1980 – 82) and earned a degree (BA Printmaking) at Maidstone College of Art (1983 – 86).

Known for her autobiographical, and confessional, art she employs a variety of techniques, including drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, neon text, film and sewn appliqué. Once the “enfant terrible” of the, so called, “Young British Artists” (a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London in 1988. Noted for “shock tactics” they achieved considerable media coverage and dominated British art during the 1990s. Many were initially supported, and their works collected by Charles Saatchi [born 1943]. Leading artists of the group, apart from Emin, was Damien Hirst [born 1965], whose work was especially appreciated by an ageing Francis Bacon [1909 – 1992]) she is now a Royal Academician and a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

In 1993, Emin opened a shop, with fellow artist Sarah Lucas (born 1962) called The Shop in Bethnal Green, London, which sold works by the two of them, including ashtrays with Damien Hirst’s picture stuck to the bottom. Later that year, in November, Emin had her first solo show at White Cube, London, called My Major Retrospective.

In 1997, her legendary work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963 – 1995, a tent appliquéd with the names of everyone the artist had ever slept with (including sexual partners, relatives she slept with as a child, her twin brother, and her two aborted children), was shown at Charles Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition, at the Royal Academy in London. This seminal piece was, unfortunately, lost forever in 2004 when a fire in a storage warehouse in East London destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection. 1997 was also the year when Emin gained further considerable media exposure when she swore repeatedly, whilst being drunk, on a live British TV show called The Death of Painting.

1999 brought with it her first solo exhibition in the United States, at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, entitled Every Part of Me’s Bleeding. Later that year, she was a Turner Prize nominee and exhibited, at the Tate Gallery, the remarkable piece My Bed– a readymade installation, consisting of her own unmade dirty bed, in which she had spent several days drinking, smoking, sleeping and having sexual intercourse while undergoing a period of severe emotional flux. The artwork, shockingly, included used condoms and underwear with menstrual stains. My bed was later put up for sale at Christie’s in 2014, where White Cube founding director Jay Jopling (born 1963) acquired it for £2,500,000, including buyer’s commission.

In 2006 the British Council announced that they had chosen Emin to produce a show of new and past works for the British Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. 2007 was also the year when the Royal Academy of Arts in London elected Emin as a Royal Academician (elevating her to Professor of Drawing four years later, thus becoming one of the first two female professors since the Academy was founded in 1768). In becoming a member of the Royal Academy Emin joined an elite group of artists that includes David Hockney OM CH RA (born 1937) and Sir Peter Blake CBE RA (born 1932). 

Emin lived in Spitalfields, East London before returning to, her childhood home, Margate (a seaside town much appreciated by the legendary painter J.M.W. Turner [1775 – 1851]) where she funds the TKE Studios with workspace for aspiring artists.

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