Tracey Emin
The confessional artist.
Tracey Emin became famous for My Bed, her own unmade bed. Her works are personal, raw and confessional.
Tracey Emin was born in 1963 in London and grew up in the seaside town of Margate in Kent, together with a twin brother. Her father was Turkish Cypriot. Her childhood was hard and poor, and she has spoken openly about the abuse she suffered as a teenager. She studied fashion at Medway, printmaking at Maidstone College of Art and then painting at the Royal College of Art in London, graduating in 1989.
After two abortions in the early 1990s she destroyed her paintings and started again. She became part of the Young British Artists. The work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 was a tent in which she had appliquéd the names of everyone she had shared a bed with, including family members and two foetuses. It was destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004.
Her best-known work is My Bed of 1998: her own unmade bed with rumpled sheets, empty bottles, cigarette ends and used knickers, following a period of depression. When it was shown at the Tate Gallery as part of the Turner Prize in 1999, it sparked enormous debate about what art is. The bed was sold in 2014 and has since been lent to Tate.
Emin works in many media: neon signs in her own handwriting, embroidered quilts, film, drawing, monoprint and, in recent years, expressive painting strongly influenced by Edvard Munch. In 2020–2021 her paintings were shown alongside Munch's, including at the Munch Museum in Oslo. She represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and became Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy.
In 2020 she was diagnosed with cancer and underwent major surgery, an experience she has depicted in her art. She has moved back to Margate, where she has founded a studio school for young artists. She was made a dame in 2024. Emin has made the autobiographical and the confessional a central part of contemporary art.