In the folds of Tracey Emin’s soul, between sex and solitude

After the evocative solo show dedicated to American painter Helen Frankenthaler, Palazzo Strozzi is once again focusing on an unconventional and courageous female artist, the British Tracey Emin (1963 Croydon, London), with the largest exhibition ever held on her, with the explicit title Sex and solitude, which will lead the visitor on an autobiographical journey without intimate and at times dramatic filters. The exhibition does not follow a chronological but thematic thread and consists of sixty works ranging from the 90s to the present day, ranging from painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, embroidery, photography and neon writing. A sort of intimate immersion in the folds of Emin’s soul in which white canvases like diary pages tell without censorship of embraces, violence, memories and pain in what is a double laying bare, external and emotional, of her experience, almost a stream of consciousness, through a raw and authentic language, which finds correspondence in the mostly tormented, restless, sincere and poetic signs (sometimes scratched, dripped, erased as if they were afterthoughts), which mix with spots of color that border on abstraction in a compositional extemporaneity substantiated by improvisation and indebted to the lesson of particularly beloved masters such as Edvard Munch (her thesis topic) and Egon Schiele.

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

The themes covered concern love and abandonment, vitalism and withdrawal, life and death; at the center, the artist’s body together with her life experiences such as sexual abuse, conflicting emotional relationships, the pain caused by abortions, the loss of her mother and the recent challenge linked to an aggressive tumor that forced her to a temporary creative stop. The exhibition opens on the rusticated façade of Palazzo Strozzi with a large site-specific neon in a bright blue that reproduces the artist’s calligraphy and that recalls the title in a declaration of intent, or rather anticipation of intent, of what will be the main concepts of the exhibition: sex experienced in adolescence in a free, instinctive way, the main form of exploration and connection with the other, then gradually undergoes arrests giving way to periods of chastity and withdrawal, and solitude (very different from isolation), suffered and rejected during youth, then sought as oxygen as it is preparatory to the creative act. A “poetic illumination”, highlighted by the two key words forged with LEDs in which the writing becomes both affirmation and confession through the use of a material that, as the curator of the exhibition Arturo Galansino, director of the Foundation, observes, is an “emotional amplifier”. As the artist herself adds, the neon of the omnipresent illuminated signs in Margate, the seaside town where she grew up, is «linked to childhood memories. (…) It is bright, bold, vibrant, it has always had a wonderful charm».

But it is not the only neon sign visible in the exhibition. Among the others, we point out the one at the beginning of the route where, in fact, the visitor can appreciate a 4 and a half meter high installation (Love Poem for CF): a highly evocative visual poem composed for her ex-partner, the gallery owner Carl Freeman, whose characters this time are tinged with a color that has always been associated with femininity and innocent and pure love, pink. To be fair, Tracey’s entire work is woven with writings, or rather words, starting with the evocative titles, which amplify their meaning and present themselves as true works of art ab latere. The monumental bronze I followed you to the end (2024), an apparently abstract, “mountainous” sculpture, which upon closer inspection reveals itself to be a woman’s body, mutilated and therefore incomplete, captured in a state of surrender (a reinterpretation in contrast to the traditional approach of celebratory bronze used to portray erect and dominant heroic male figures), occupies the Renaissance courtyard: over 3.5 tons installed thanks to a crane that lowered it from the top of the building. This body folded in on itself, on all fours, synthesizes the anger and dejection of those who have become aware of a loss, just like the heavy and marked material that shapes it, veteran of a ferocious hand-to-hand fight on a surface where Emin’s imprints remained while modeling the clay mold from which the bronze was cast.

The same grandeur is found in the sculpture placed on the main floor All I want is you, created after the death of her mother, which takes up a female figure while it seems to generate from the magmatic mass that flanks her. Daughters of this way of operating but which distance themselves from the overflowing sculptural two-dimensionality, the series of headless bronze bodies with plastic forms welcomed in the exhibition (organisms in tension, throbbing that condense vitalism and tragedy), in dialogue with the previously mentioned paintings, as well as the small bodies bathed in a silver nitrate patina that makes them iridescent and precious. A true unicum in Emin’s production, the collection of five milky, candid and ethereal sculptures dated 2013, representing totemic animals and women, accompanied by short hermetic sentences, engraved on rectangular pedestals, created in a foundry in Long Island where she worked alongside the French artist Louise Bourgeois. The monographic exhibition also hosts a selection of small-format paintings produced during Covid and dedicated to her late mother, poised between reflections, memories and reconciliation; and again, calico and multicolored and floral fabric works. In these artistic artefacts, a certain craftsmanship shines through, also consequent to the artist’s origins (her father was Turkish Cypriot and her English mother of Roma descent) as well as the desire to choose a traditionally “feminine” material. On these fabrics and patchwork quilts usually associated with domesticity, protection and care, provocative, raw, desperate thoughts are embroidered, often in contrast, between denied motherhood, rejection, death and aging. The exhibition itinerary closes with a corpus of engravings dated 2022, made following the surgery she underwent: dark works contrasted by pure whites where Tracey relates to her transformed body in a portrayal without sweetening.

Palazzo Strozzi will not be showing the legendary ready-made installation My Bed (the rumpled bed where Tracey lived for four days semi-conscious in a state of depression after the breakup of a relationship, surrounded by pills, cigarette butts, used underwear, bottles of alcohol, handkerchiefs and condoms), one of the most representative works of Brit-Art, whose last collector Christian Duerckheim defined as «a metaphor for life, a place where suffering begins and logic dies». Exhibited in 1999 at the Tate in London, it made the artist famous by nominating her for the Turner Prize and earning her the epithet of bad girl in the circle of Young British Artists: a springboard for what would be her rising career that saw her, among other things, represent the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and hold the chair of Drawing at the Royal Academy in London since 2011. Also missing (a choice that was probably forced and perhaps predictable given that the artist no longer wanted to reproduce it after it was destroyed in 2004 during the fire that hit the Momart warehouse of collector Charles Saatchi, who had purchased it), is the iconic Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995: a Canadian camping tent inside which Emin had hand-embroidered the 102 names of all the people with whom she had shared her bed: lovers, family, friends and her two aborted children.

However, there is a reconstruction of that area of a gallery in Stuttgart that Tracey had chosen as a temporary studio and where she had worked on the performance Exorcism of the last painting I ever Made (1996), literally laying herself bare for three and a half weeks (the time between one menstrual cycle and the next), creating works inspired by great artists such as Schiele, Klein, Picasso, under the gaze of the public, in a highly significant performative act in which she placed herself as the subject and artistic object, and at the same time in a passionate and intense reappropriation of that art forcibly interrupted during pregnancy due to the nausea caused by oil paints and turpentine and after the trauma resulting from the abortion. An art as psychological introspection that of Tracey Emin, salvific, with a thaumaturgical power capable of soothing, as if it were a ritual, the wounds of life, sublimating them, to the point of sometimes making them real choral experiences of sharing.

Info:

Tracey Emin. Sex and Solitude
curated by Arturo Galansino
16/03/2025 – 20/07/2025
Palazzo Strozzi
Piazza Strozzi, Firenze
www.palazzostrozzi.org

Tristana Chinni

After classical studies, she enrolled at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy in Bologna, graduating in History of Cinema (DAMS) and later in Art History. She obtained a Master in Communication for cultural enterprises. Journalist and critic, she collaborates with various print and online magazines specialized in the artistic and cultural sector, including Finestre sull’Arte, Segno, Exibart, Zeta-International magazine of poems and research, Punto e Linea Magazine, Gagarin Orbite Culturali. She loves art in all its forms, preferring modern, contemporary and research.

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Phenomenology of intermittence..