Tracey Emin

Tracy Emin - The art project “Shop” as part of the Young British Artists

Tracy Emin was born in Croydon, London on 3 July 1963. The daughter of an English mother and a Turkish father, she left school early at the age of 13. Fror 1981 to 1982 she attended the Medway College of Design in Rochester, Kent, where he acquired a fashion diploma followed by a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Maidstone College of Art. In 1987 she began a course at the Royal College of Art whilst also studying philosophy at Birbeck University. Emin and her artist friend Sarah Lucas founded the short-lived art project “Shop“ in 1993, part of the Young British Artists movement, which ran for only six months, but it opened the door to the London art scene for its managers. Only one year later, Tracy Emin held her first solo exhibition in the commercial London gallery White Cube under the name My Major Retrospective. 

Scandal-laden artworks with intimate details

Tracy Emin quickly developed into an enfant terrible of the British art scene with works such as the installation Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, also known as The Tent. The work did actually feature a tent which the artist decorated with the names of all the people she had shared a bed with - her ex-boyfriend Billy Childish taking prominent place just behind the opening of the tent. The businessman and art patron Charles Saatchi bought the work, but unfortunately it fell victim of a warehouse fire in 2004. Tracy Emin refused to recreate her lost creation. Her participation in the television discussion The Death of Painting, in which she took part heavily intoxicated and swearing, also achieved great publicity. A further work, My Bed, caused a commotion because she installed her personal sleeping quarters including rumpled bed clothes, used condoms and blood-stained underwear. The work was included in the Turner Prize exhibition of the Tate Gallery and sold at auction for £2.2 million. 

Controversial and celebrated

Tracey Emin processes her very personal life story in her scandal-inducing artworks, a story burdened by sexual abuse and social constraints. Despite all the scandal, Emin has also won admirers in conservative circles: The former British Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned the artwork More Passion from her and had it hung in 10 Downing Street. After Emin became angry with the new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, she publicly called for her picture to be taken down. Tracy Emin has won prizes and honours for her art including the Internationalen Videokunstpreis des ZKM Karlsruhe in 1995 and was made Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2003. In 2011, Emin was appointed professor of drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts and was thus only the second woman, after Fiona Rae, to be given this honour since the founding of the academy in 1768.

Tracy Emin lives and works in London.