What To Expect From Tracey Emin’s New Solo Show At White Cube

Olivia Cole reflects on ‘I followed you to the end’, Tracey Emin’s new show at White Cube.

Tracey Emin: ‘I Followed You To The End’ At White Cube – Review

Dame Tracey Emin’s art has always been uncompromising, confessional and raw yet her practice is taken to new levels in her latest show, which opens at White Cube on 19 September.

‘I followed you to the end’ confrontsEmin’s near death experience and altered state of being since a life changing cancer diagnosis.  She doesn’t just have a harsh inner critic, she has a brutal inner art critic and she talked this week with comic honesty and a true artist’s perspective about looking death in the face in 2020. ‘I keep telling people, I’m really lucky, I shouldn’t be here. I’m so lucky,’ she said. ‘When you’ve looked death in the face like that, or anyone has (and I’m not talking about a near crash, an accident – I’ve had a few of them) but you’ve got probably six months to live, you start thinking, Oh my god, what have I done? And I thought, What do I do? Do I drop dead, being a mediocre YBA, from the 90s? I don’t think so… I’m going to pull my socks up.’

Those critical voices more than get their answers here with this new body of work: monumental sculpture and paintings big enough to fill the vast urban cathedral like spaces of White Cube Bermondsey. ‘I followed you to the end’ showcases the largest sculpture she has made to date, but everything about this show is big: frequently epic in scale and depths of visceral, feeling. Like her disaster zone bed that made her a household name by presenting the debri of a life in crisis, even her stoma is, for Emin, a cause for celebration. She sees it as a pulsating life force (she’s put it on film in material hard to watch) and an almost miraculous way of living that has given her the chance for this extraordinary second act.

Painting is a return to her first love, which she studied at the Royal Academy. Then, as a very young artist, she famously destroyed all of her own work when it didn’t come up to her own exacting standards.  Now, at this year’s summer show,  she won the Academy’s highest accolade, the Charles Wollaston Award for the ‘most distinguished work’ in the Summer Exhibition, with new paintings from this period.  The landscape of the sick bed is here as a place of illness, pain, grief, nightmares, peace (there is the comfort of human company, imagined or real, and the playful presence of her two cats Teacup and Pancake) dreaming, redemption and even rebirth. The admiration they inspire is heightened by the fact that when she started to recover, she couldn’t ‘lift a tea pot’ as she says, let alone wrangle massive canvases, paints and brushes.  Her new monograph, Paintings, (published by Phaidon this month) collects them all but to stand with them face to face is unforgettable. These paintings are exhilarating, as well as frequently eviscerating.  Dame Tracey is a quieter calmer presence than the YBA who made herself heard, but her work has never seemed louder, more alive or more of a must see.

On one of the title paintings, she reflects on the material for so much of her work over the years, the lovers for whom her longing gave her so many dark nights of the soul. The haunting text reads:

            ‘You made me like this. All of you – you – you men

            that I so insanely loved so much.  You are the ones that

            made me feel so alone.  All of you – each of you in

            your individual way. I – I – I was at fault to keep loving

            you. Like a fool I followed love to the end.  Like the

            sad haunted soul that I am, I followed you to the end’.

The words on the painting talk about the men in her life, but ‘I followed you to the end,’…  I asked her if that was art, as well?

 ‘Well, I’ve never done anything else in my life but art,’ was her powerful answer. ‘Even, say, on my death bed or whatever… I’ll be saying to Harry [Harry Weller, her devoted assistant of 15 years] that’s three more lines, that’s three more lines. It will be my biography or something. Even if I can’t move and I can’t work or whatever, or can’t paint, I will be writing. Or dictating. So yeah, art to the absolute end. I will follow art into the next world. And I’ll come back, and haunt people.’ She won’t need to, as the work will do all the talking for her. It’s for the ages.

VISIT

‘I followed you to the end’ will run from 19 September to 10 November at White Cube Bermondsey. 144 – 152 Bermondsey Street. London SE1 3TQ. whitecube.com

READ

Tracey Emin Paintings is published by Phaidon this month. phaidon.com