Tracey Emin 'I followed you to the end' at White Cube

Tracey Emin 'I followed you to the end' at White Cube Bermondsey. Photo taken from White Cube Installation Views.

By PIPER OLIVAS October 28, 2024 

In a world of superficiality, Tracey Emin is a pillar of authenticity. Her artistic vocabulary is raw and expressive -- there is both a stillness and violence within her brushstrokes. To view a work by Tracey Emin is to allow yourself to be a vessel to her lifes confessional.

Emin returns to White Cube, with a new exhibition titled I followed you to the end. Here, Emin explores love, loss, rebirth, and mortality. This exhibition is intimate yet expansive in size, featuring paintings, sculptures, and a video. The works on view are persistent, provocative and stay with you even after you’ve left the gallery.

When I was at University, sitting in my cramped single dorm room, I often thought of Emin’s artworks. The bedroom is a common theme within Emin’s work and is more than just a place to rest at the end of the day. It contains an entire life lived, scattered in drawers, on the floor, on the walls. The bedroom may speak to the state of one's well-being, it may contain traces of visitors and pieces of experiences we've had. So many of us collect objects, garments, clippings, and books - they remind us of people, places, and periods of our lives. One may argue that the bedroom is, in its own way, a medium of its own artistic expression, and ultimately represents who we are presently and who we have been. Throughout the years, Emin’s paintings and sculptures have often returned to the bedroom and the bed, as personified subjects.

Emin is one of the most ambitious autobiographical artists of her time. Within her work, seemingly private spaces and moments become exposed for others to experience. Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, for instance, included hand-stitched names of all the people Tracey Emin had slept with from 1963 to 1995. Another seminal work, My Bed, 1998 shows a replicated scene of Emin’s bedroom after a depressive episode in Waterloo. To Emin, the bed is both her throne and her tomb, where she suffers and feels pleasure. Emin is her artwork, and vice versa. 

‘Well, the bed is brilliant, because – what am I known for?’ Emin stated, during a conversation with Susan May (Global Artistic Director of White Cube) prior to the opening.

In this exhibition, the bed is once again a subject and an object of emotion to Emin, who recently underwent major surgery after a diagnosis of aggressive bladder cancer and was in recovery. The works relentlessly express the loss and pain Emin experienced, with her own body and relationship. These portraits, painted in hues of red, pink, and blue, are somber, sensual, and raw. My Dead Body – A Trace of Life (2024) features a poignant stillness, representing death and absence, whereas Not Fuckable, 2024 features two nude figures, the brushstrokes, insinuate movement – or some sort of resurrection, although the title suggests failure. Perhaps the most revelatory work is a minimal painting, which features the passage ‘I don’t want to have sex because my body feels dead’ which read to me like an agonizing vow. Directly across, a monumentally large bronze sculpture titled I Followed You to the End, 2024 is semi- abstract and imperfect, as I walked around it, the subject revealed itself as sprawled legs, – which may be a double entendre, as both a position of sex and of exposure, or vulnerability.  

Tracey Emin 'I followed you to the end' at White Cube Bermondsey. Photo taken from White Cube Installation Views.

The exhibition also features a film, which examines an aspect of Emin’s recovery. ‘This film is of my daily ritual when I change my bag: my stomach is often bleeding.’ Emin states ‘A bit like ‘My Bed’ in 1998, I thought I hate it so much! No! It’s actually quite beautiful, it depends how you look at it.’

Throughout the entire exhibition, tension rises and falls, within life and death, Emin’s paintings hold her pain, rage, and isolation. I found myself dwelling on performativity within womanhood and sex. What is the female body worth, and what do these organs represent during sickness or recovery when they no longer work as they once did? What, and who is a woman without the availability of her womb or when she is no longer available for sex to her partner? 

During my time viewing the exhibition, often when I approached a painting, I noticed a woman, like myself, looking up, holding the space around her to share a moment with Emin, moved by the reckoning of what was in front of her. Walking out, the paintings began to blend -  like a graveyard for both womanhood and aging, and I felt myself overcome with a familiar tenderness for Emin. WM

Tracey Emin, ‘I followed you to the end’ is on view at White Cube Bermondsey, London, from 19 September – 10 November 2024