Tracey Emin
I've Got It All, 2000
Ink-jet print
124 x 109 cm
Tracey Emin is almost always portrayed as a Diana-esque femme tragique. It's rare to get a glimpse of the happy, successful, confident person she's become. I've Got It All is a transient crowning glory: a shameless, two-fingers up to her critics. Emin's triumphed over all, and has money up the whazoo to boot!
Tracey Emin
Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (detail), 1996
Installation details of 14 paintings from a total of 97 works.
In 1974, Joseph Beuys did a performance called I Love America, and America Loves Me where he lived in a gallery with a wild coyote for seven days as a symbolic act of reconciliation with nature. In 1996, Tracey Emin lived in a locked room in a gallery for fourteen days, with nothing but a lot of empty canvases and art materials, in an attempt to reconcile herself with paintings. Viewed through a series of wide-angle lenses embedded in the walls, Emin could be watched, stark naked, shaking off her painting demons. Starting by making images like the artists she really admired (i.e. Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, Yves Klein), Emin's two-week art-therapy session resulted in a massive outpouring of autobiographical images, and the discovery of a style all her own. The room was extracted in its entirety, and now exists as an installation work.
Tracey Emin
Sleep, 1996
Monoprint and stitched label on cotton pillowcase
50 x 73 cm
Using experiences from her own life, Tracey Emin often reveals painful situations with brutal honesty and poetic humour. The personal expands to the universal in the way Emin takes a feeling about her life and forms it into a genuine expression of a human emotion.