Sex and Solitude and dissimulation. Tracey Emin at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.

By LUCA AVIGO March 29, 2025

Nudity in art has obviously been de-stigmatized long ago, but what’s not obvious is that in a show where it’s omnipresent in such a sexualized connotation it never feels confrontational but always empathetic. That’s the magic of Sex and Solitude, Tracey Emin’s latest exhibition, encompassing over thirty years of her artistic production in the historic halls of the prestigious Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, running until July 20.
 

Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.

Not to be taken for a retrospective, which the artist explicitly wanted to avoid (hence the choice of a thematic rather than chronological order and possibly explaining the absence of her two seminal standout works, the tent embroidered with the names of Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), which she said she’d “never do now” as it would be too invasive of others’ privacy, and My Bed (1999), symbol of vulnerability and depression, Turner Prize runner-up and said to have been kept by Charles Saatchi in his dining room before ending up in the Francis Bacon room of the Tate Britain) Sex and Solitude still successfully encapsulates in less than 60 works the artist’s poetic universe, in what she herself regards—as curator Arturo Galansino claims—as the most important exhibition of her career. 

Whether intentional or not, the omission of her most unique and iconic works might actually benefit the show, as what is featured feels like a coherent whole, focusing specifically on Emin’s use of text and figuration across a precise selection of media: from large to small canvases, from miniature to monumental sculptures, from calico embroideries to silkscreen monotypes, from phrases sewn on quilts to neons, one of which is a new site-specific piece that towers over the entrance of the palace with the title of the exhibition.

Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.

Even without the title, sex and solitude would surely emerge as the exhibition’s central themes: two opposing forces that by definition negate each other, but which Emin has always seen as universal cornerstones of the human experience to be reconciled through art. By positioning these extremes at either end of one axis, and abstraction and figuration at the ends of a perpendicular axis, one can conceive a spectrum that ideally represents Emin’s established imagery, allowing each exhibited work to find its Cartesian coordinates. Grouping them together highlights how their differences stem from varying proportions of the same sources, while also revealing their one constant: sincerity. Which, in Tracey Emin’s case, could—should—be considered a medium in itself. Adding a third dimension to the aforementioned Cartesian space, and a fourth to the works themselves, Emin has mastered the art of sincerity, just like many others have mastered painting or sculpture. That is the secret behind the magic described at the beginning—the spell that transforms obscenity into candor and vulgarity into a shamelessness that is not just innocent, but necessary, as it carries the weight of confession. 

Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.

Highly explicit scenes and titles (e.g., Not Fuckable (2024); I Wanted You To Fuck Me So Much I Couldn’t Paint Anymore (2020)), instead of being offensive or provocative, magically convey vulnerability: not because they act as a tough exterior hiding an underlying fragility, but inherently fragile precisely because they are completely sincere. But the same applies to examples at the other end of the spectrum, not vulgar but explicitly sentimental: the only reason one can perceive works like I Was So Hurt I Was Crying (2021), Hurt Heart (2015), It was all too Much (2018), You have no idea how safe you make me feel (2013) as meaningful rather than as mere schmaltz—or, at worst, social media bait—is the deep trust Emin has built in her honesty over the years. This is why she may be the only artist who, when asked how to succeed in the art world, can pick up a pen and a sheet and say "this is all you need" without sounding pretentious or absurd. And that is precisely what she did during the press conference for the exhibition’s opening. Her response, which might seem arrogant or trivial on paper, proved to be deeply impactful, silencing the room before it erupted in applause, because we all knew, or rather felt, that she truly meant it; a dynamic that defines her entire body of work, but that relies on something beyond the “pen and paper” in question and the artist’s undeniable charisma. Emin’s secret ingredient is her unique ability to dissimulate her references into something (only seemingly) immediate and natural—just like the way she carefully calibrates intelligible figures in erotic poses and abstract digressions, whose apparently spontaneous balance (strongest in the dripping acrylic brushstrokes and the sculptural clumps covered in fingerprints) is, in fact, intentional and calculated (as demonstrated by the neons immortalizing Emin’s handwriting and the embroideries carefully tracing her scribbles). 

Tracey Emin, I waited so Long (2022; acrylic on canvas, 183.1 × 183.3 cm) © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Foto HV-Studio.
 

Her signature lying uninhibited nudes give the impression of having been effortlessly sketched in a surge of sensuality by someone with a great hand and strong instinct; they don’t scream out loud that they reference and evolve a specific theme central to art history, from Courbet’s L’origine du monde (1866) to Duchamp’s Étant donnés (1946-66), characterizing in the meantime the body of work of her two greatest influences, Schiele and Munch, whom she studied extensively at Maidstone Art College (graduated with first class degree in 1986) and at the Royal College of Art (Master's degree in Painting in 1989). And not only does she ground her work in this heritage, becoming part of its lineage, but she also reclaims an imagery that’s always been prerogative of the male gaze and makes it the purest expression of feminine intimacy. All of this might not be evident, but it is there, and it is felt: she makes her conscious references seem subconscious and we subconsciously pick them up. And she knows we do.