A Second Life

A Second Life brings together more than three decades of Tracey Emin’s work, tracing the development of a practice in which autobiography, vulnerability and formal experimentation remain tightly intertwined. Painting, sculpture, neon, film, textiles and installation reveal the many ways Emin has returned to subjects including desire, trauma, illness, grief and survival.

The exhibition places iconic works from the 1990s alongside later paintings and recent pieces made after major illness, allowing shifts in medium and tone to be seen across the artist’s career. Rather than treating autobiography as confession alone, the presentation foregrounds how Emin repeatedly transforms private experience into a public visual language.

Painting has become increasingly central to that language. Loosely rendered bodies and emotionally charged colour connect recent canvases with earlier drawings and monoprints, while neon texts and stitched works extend the role of handwriting, language and bodily presence across the exhibition.

Seen at Tate Modern, the retrospective also situates Emin within a broader history of contemporary British art, showing how her work challenged conventions around seriousness, intimacy and what kinds of lived experience could occupy major institutional space.

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