“Walking into Tate Modern’s huge Tracey Emin retrospective is like walking in on her crying, naked, sobbing and snotty,” said Eddy Frankel in The Guardian. It feels as though “you have stumbled into something painfully private”.
This isn’t an “easy thing to pull off” in such a “cavernous” space but the fact that she can is what makes Emin “such a special, important, era-defining artist”. She first “shocked the nation” in the early 1990s and, ever since, has been making “art so raw, so visceral, so emotionally honest that she forces you to feel what she feels”.
The new show is a “fitting tribute” to Emin’s “brand of belligerent resilience”, said Laura Freeman in The Times. Other members of the loose group of Young British Artists who “established a mouthy reputation” 40-odd years ago “have had their Tate tributes”. Now it’s Emin’s turn.
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“Moody” Farrow & Ball paint and low-level lighting have “tamed and tidied up” Emin’s show into a “tasteful affair”. But the “rawness” of her art “still comes roaring through. This is a show that gets under your skin and into your bowels.” Emin reveals her wounds, “holds up blood-stained canvasses”, “offers up the bottle of painkillers she took after an abortion in 1990”, and shares zoomed-in photos of her stoma (she was diagnosed with aggressive bladder cancer in 2020 and is now in remission).
While the “relentless focus on self could be exhausting”, Emin eschews self-pity, instead delving into her regrets and displaying a “tender embarrassment“ for the little girl she was. “Mostly, though, there’s a sense of eff-off defiance. Past isn’t destiny. Second lives are possible.”
Emin’s later paintings are “highly seductive”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent, with “beautifully fluent lines”. But the “narrowness” of the predominantly red and blue colour palette becomes “monotonous” and I was “left wanting a lot more”.
Her recent acrylics are “impassioned” but “samey”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. And “I soon tired” of the “many framed sheets of writing paper covered with her stream-of-consciousness prose”. Showcasing “intimate” photos of her “post-operative body is brave, but how are these images transformed in any way into art”?
Still, her monochromatic embroidered blankets pack “an aesthetic punch”, and her famous “My Bed” (1998) – a recreation of Emin’s unmade bed, complete with cigarette butts, vodka bottles, used condoms, “stained mattress and bedraggled sheets” – looks as “squalid as ever”. It is, by far, “the rawest, most powerful thing Emin has assembled”.
“Don’t come here looking for a good time – you won’t find it,” said Frankel in The Guardian. But if you’re after “pure, unapologetic, undiluted, full-frontal love, grief, heartache and sadness”, you will feel it all in spades at this “wildly emotional” exhibition.
