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.
(via onomatopoeias)
Source: fuckmedraco
Sleeping With You (2005)
Reclaimed painted timber and white neon
Source: lehmannmaupin.com
Just Hanging (2010)
(via Spread ArtCulture: Exhibition: Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin Relive Their Past Together)
Source: The Huffington Post
A Million Ways to Come (2010)
(via Spread ArtCulture: Exhibition: Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin Relive Their Past Together)
Source: The Huffington Post
Looking for The Mother (2010)
“Before her death recently at the age of 98, Louise Bourgeois had just finished work on a series of prints with Tracey Emin, which they had collaborated on during the last two years of the artist’s life. Bourgeois had composed a series of 16 profiled torsos in gouache and Emin had ‘responded’ by adding drawings over them with text and ink.
Their work together began when Ms. Bourgeois had agreed to meet Ms. Emin at her request. Despite Ms. Bourgeois’ reputation of being a formidable woman, according to Emin, they had got along well and had agreed to take part in a drawing project. Ms.Bourgeois had always been surrounded by young people, and in spite of the age difference they found their work had many themes in common.
Louis Bourgeois had once declared, “Art is the experience of, the re-experience of trauma,” and much of Emin’s work revists the past. When I interviewed Emin just a few months before Ms Bourgeois’s death, we spoke of her relationship with the elder artist and I had suggested to her then that Ms. Bourgeois’ work was interior like her own, revolving around ideas of wombs and wounds.
“We both work with recurring themes as well. Things that come again and again in our life, that don’t go away. The damage may be done and you forget it, then it comes back again,” she said.
“Reliving one’s painful past” Emin continued, “is pretty healthy. You’re not holding it inside you; you are letting it go into the ether. “”
(via Spread ArtCulture: Exhibition: Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin Relive Their Past Together)
Source: The Huffington Post
Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, 2010. Portrait by Brigitte Cornand
(via Spread ArtCulture: Exhibition: Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin Relive Their Past Together)
Source: The Huffington Post
Various Works from The Family Suite (1994)
“The Family Suite monoprints are among the very earliest and most deeply personal of Emin’s works. The series recalls moments from her childhood in Margate where she lived with her family in a hotel run by her father. Family Suite includes images of Emin’s mother lighting up; her father with his briefcase; a haunting self portrait as a ten-year old; the false front teeth she had fitted at the age of twelve, after her brother had accidentally head-butted her; and various images of sex – perhaps showing Emin herself, or scenes she witnessed. The dark, nervous line created by the monoprint technique gives the works something of the directness of children’s’ drawings.”
Source: nationalgalleries.org
Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (detail) (1996)
(via Tracey Emin - Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (detail) - Contemporary Art)
Source: saatchi-gallery.co.uk
Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (detail) (1996)
Source: saatchi-gallery.co.uk
Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (detail)
(via Tracey Emin - Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (detail) - Contemporary Art)
Source: saatchi-gallery.co.uk
