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TRACEY EMIN: Bad Girl Artist

David the Bruce • Dec 10, 2018

The Bad Girl of the Young British Artists Movement

Personal traumatic events such as unreported rape, public humiliation, sexism, botched abortions, alcoholism, and promiscuity have been the backdrop of her highly personal art.

Best known as the bad girl of the YBA* generation, Tracey Emin is now one of the most successful artists working anywhere in the world. This film follows Emin at work in her studio as she prepares for an exhibition in Vienna, where her work is displayed alongside that of Egon Schiele, her artistic hero. In recent years Emin has shifted focus to more figurative work, creating paintings and sculptures that continue to explore her most intimate concerns. She speaks candidly about a life devoted to making art, as well as her ambitions for the future.

*TBA =Young British Artists movement.

PART 1

PART 2

Tracey Emin , CBE, RA (; born 1963) is an English artist known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. Emin produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts.

In 1997, her work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 , a tent appliquéd with the names of everyone the artist had ever shared a bed with was shown at Charles Saatchi's Sensation exhibition held at the Royal Academy in London. The same year, she gained considerable media exposure when she swore repeatedly in a state of drunkenness on a live discussion programme called The Death of Painting on British television.

In 1999, Emin had 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 My Bed – a readymade installation, consisting of her own unmade dirty bed, in which she had spent several weeks drinking, smoking, eating, sleeping and having sexual intercourse while undergoing a period of severe emotional flux. The artwork featured used condoms and blood-stained underwear.

Emin is also a panellist and speaker: she has lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (2010), the Royal Academy of Arts (2008), and the Tate Britain in London (2005) about the links between creativity and autobiography, and the role of subjectivity and personal histories in constructing art. Emin's covers a variety of different media, including needlework and sculpture, drawing, video and installation, photography and painting.

In December 2011, she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy; with Fiona Rae, she is one of the first two female professors since the Academy was founded in 1768.

Emin lives in Spitalfields, east London.

EXAMPLES OF HER ART

Tracey Emin
Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (detail)
1996

Tracey Emin
Untitled (Porchester Baths)
1988
Oil on board
28 x 26 cm

Tracey Emin
Untitled
2000
Photographic print
104 x 130 cm

Artist: Tracey Emin (British, born 1963)
Title: Naked photos - Life model goes mad (in 9 parts)
1996
Medium: color coupler print
Size: 29.4 x 29.4 cm. (11.6 x 11.6 in.)

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