Tracey Emin: The Last Great Adventure is You, White Cube
For the first time in London for five years, a new exhibition opens from Tracey Emin. White Cube Gallery’s Bermondsey address presents a series of unmissable work
Tracey Emin, 'Good Red Love', 2014, © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2014 Photo: Ben Westoby Courtesy White Cube
The Last Great Adventure is You
In this body of work, made over two years, Tracey Emin sticks to her most productive subjects: her own life and interior world, and processes as an artist. This is familiar ground. Emin’s art is always openly autobiographical, dealing with adolescent sexual encounters, rape and her tough upbringing in the seaside town of Margate. However, in this exhibition, White Cube have opted for a virtuoso, cross-media show. The title, ‘The Last Great Adventure is You’, might be an optimistic ruse if it didn’t have notes of tragedy. Emin explains: ‘the work is about rites of passage, of time and age, and the simple realisation that we are always alone’ (July 2014).
Royal Academy
Today Emin is Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy, though she has always insisted to fans that the medium eludes her. The Turner prize nominee, who shot to fame with the conceptual installation My Bed (1999), has developed in later years a more expressively broken or ‘crude’ line. However, expect to find here works in paint rather than pencil. These eccentric pictures have been worked and reworked, and some even obliterated and begun again in her anxiety over her relationship to the finished work.
What to look out for
Expect too Emin’s self-reflexive subject of the female body, which is more overtly ‘naked’ than ‘nude’, to dominate. Look out also for the tour de force image of a crumpled reclining woman against a fierce red wash.
This show debuts Emin’s most significant body of sculpture to date. In her chosen medium of bronze she has achieved a delicate balance between solidity and fluid curves that indicate her competence in this surprisingly ‘classical’ material. Stand out works include Grotto (2014), portraying a small figure – a metaphor for an artist – within an overwhelming cavern, and Bird (2014).
Alongside Emin’s gouaches and sculptures are her scrawled works in neon and large embroideries: a loaded, gendered medium for a female artist infamous for displaying soiled knickers and used condoms.
Tracey Emin: the phenomenon
As the critic Julian Stallabrass explains, our opinion of this divisive artist hinges on whether we ‘believe’ her or not; whether we take her unrelenting expressions of suffering and trauma as the authentic stuff of art or as part of a calculated media campaign seeking wealth, fame and even a CBE. The dilemma is a very modern one. Emin’s many fervent fans aside, this exhibition is an unmissable chance for you to make up your mind.
In this body of work, made over two years, Tracey Emin sticks to her most productive subjects: her own life and interior world, and processes as an artist. This is familiar ground. Emin’s art is always openly autobiographical, dealing with adolescent sexual encounters, rape and her tough upbringing in the seaside town of Margate. However, in this exhibition, White Cube have opted for a virtuoso, cross-media show. The title, ‘The Last Great Adventure is You’, might be an optimistic ruse if it didn’t have notes of tragedy. Emin explains: ‘the work is about rites of passage, of time and age, and the simple realisation that we are always alone’ (July 2014).
Royal Academy
Today Emin is Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy, though she has always insisted to fans that the medium eludes her. The Turner prize nominee, who shot to fame with the conceptual installation My Bed (1999), has developed in later years a more expressively broken or ‘crude’ line. However, expect to find here works in paint rather than pencil. These eccentric pictures have been worked and reworked, and some even obliterated and begun again in her anxiety over her relationship to the finished work.
What to look out for
Expect too Emin’s self-reflexive subject of the female body, which is more overtly ‘naked’ than ‘nude’, to dominate. Look out also for the tour de force image of a crumpled reclining woman against a fierce red wash.
This show debuts Emin’s most significant body of sculpture to date. In her chosen medium of bronze she has achieved a delicate balance between solidity and fluid curves that indicate her competence in this surprisingly ‘classical’ material. Stand out works include Grotto (2014), portraying a small figure – a metaphor for an artist – within an overwhelming cavern, and Bird (2014).
Alongside Emin’s gouaches and sculptures are her scrawled works in neon and large embroideries: a loaded, gendered medium for a female artist infamous for displaying soiled knickers and used condoms.
Tracey Emin: the phenomenon
As the critic Julian Stallabrass explains, our opinion of this divisive artist hinges on whether we ‘believe’ her or not; whether we take her unrelenting expressions of suffering and trauma as the authentic stuff of art or as part of a calculated media campaign seeking wealth, fame and even a CBE. The dilemma is a very modern one. Emin’s many fervent fans aside, this exhibition is an unmissable chance for you to make up your mind.
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| What | Tracey Emin: The Last Great Adventure is You, White Cube |
| Where | White Cube Bermondsey, 144-152 Bermondsey Street , London, SE1 3TQ | MAP |
| Nearest tube | London Bridge (underground) |
| When |
08 Oct 14 – 16 Nov 14, 12:00 AM – 12:00 AM |
| Price | £Free |
| Website | Click here for more information |