Tracey Emin’s “A Second Life” to Open at Tate Modern in 2026
Next spring, Tate Modern will present A Second Life, the most comprehensive exhibition ever staged of Dame Tracey Emin’s work. Spanning four decades, the show promises to be both a survey of Emin’s extraordinary career and a deeply personal reflection on the life events that have shaped it.
Written by:
ARTCOLLECTORNEWS
Date:
Sep 10, 2025
Few artists have captured the raw intersections of art and autobiography quite like Emin. Since her early notoriety in the 1990s, she has pushed the boundaries of confession in contemporary art—using her own body, memories, and traumas to explore love, loss, desire, and survival. A Second Life will bring together over 90 works across painting, video, textile, neon, sculpture, and installation, many on view for the first time.
The exhibition begins with the artist’s earliest confessional works, including Tracey Emin CV 1995 and the video Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), both of which foreground her instantly recognisable first-person voice. These will be shown alongside photographs of paintings from her art school years—destroyed in the aftermath of a turbulent period in her life—offering a poignant introduction to the cycle of rupture and renewal that runs through her career.
Margate, Emin’s birthplace and spiritual anchor, also threads its way through the exhibition. Her textile piece Mad Tracey from Margate: Everybody’s Been There (1997) and the rollercoaster sculpture It’s Not the Way I Want to Die (2005) revisit the seaside town’s amusement park, Dreamland, as both playground and site of anxiety. More recent works connect Margate to Emin’s present life: following her mother’s death in 2016 and her own battle with cancer in 2020, she returned permanently, establishing the Tracey Emin Artist Residency as a free, studio-based school.
The heart of the exhibition lies in two seminal installations: Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), in which Emin staged a public confrontation with her estrangement from painting, and My Bed (1998), her Turner Prize–nominated work that remains one of the defining icons of British art at the turn of the millennium. These works form the pivot between what Emin herself calls her “first life” and the “second life” that followed her illness and surgery.
Pain and survival are never far from Emin’s practice. Works addressing sexual violence, abortion, and misogyny—including the neon I Could Have Loved My Innocence (2007) and the never-before-shown quilt The Last of the Gold (2002)—demonstrate her refusal to separate the personal from the political. In How It Feels (1996), she recounts in unflinching detail the consequences of a botched abortion, an artwork as much testimony as art object.
The exhibition’s final rooms shift toward transcendence. Large-scale paintings made in recent years reveal Emin grappling with the fragility of her post-cancer body while embracing its new strength. The bronze Ascension (2024) and documentary stills showing the stoma she now lives with offer a startlingly direct encounter with survival. Outside Tate Modern, the monumental bronze I Followed You Until The End (2023) will command the South Bank, extending her presence beyond the gallery walls.
Speaking of the show, Emin reflects: “I feel this show, titled ‘A Second Life,’ will be a benchmark for me. A moment in my life when I look back and go forward. A true celebration of living.”
Curated by Tate’s Maria Balshaw with Alvin Li and Jess Baxter, and presented in collaboration with Gucci, A Second Life marks a milestone for an artist who has never shied from confronting the most difficult truths of her existence. Far from a retrospective in the traditional sense, the exhibition promises to be a visceral journey through one of the most uncompromising voices in contemporary art.
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