Tracey Emin

Margate, Maidstone and the Royal College

Tracey Karima Emin was born in 1963 in Croydon, in south London, to an English mother and a Turkish Cypriot father, and was brought up in Margate on the Kent coast with her twin brother Paul. Her childhood and adolescence there were marked by poverty and by sexual violence, and she has spoken and written about both with a directness that later became the defining quality of her art.

She studied fashion at Medway College of Design, where she met the painter, poet and musician Billy Childish and fell in with the Medway Poets. She then took a first class degree in printmaking at Maidstone, and finally an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in London. After graduating she went through two abortions, destroyed almost everything she had made as a student, and later described the period as emotional suicide. Her acknowledged influences, then and now, are Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele.

The confession as a medium

In 1993 Emin opened a short lived shop in Bethnal Green with Sarah Lucas, selling work the two of them made, and in November of the same year had her first solo exhibition at White Cube. It was called My Major Retrospective and was assembled from personal photographs, images of the paintings she had destroyed and objects that most artists would never consider showing.

In 1995 the curator Carl Freedman placed her in Minky Manky at the South London Gallery. For it she made the work that changed her position entirely: a small blue tent appliqued inside with the names of everyone she had ever slept with, a list that included lovers, relatives she had shared a bed with as a child, her twin brother and her two aborted children. Charles Saatchi bought it, and it went into Sensation at the Royal Academy in 1997. In 1999 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize and showed My Bed at the Tate, an unmade bed surrounded by the debris of a period of collapse, which provoked an argument in the British press that has never entirely stopped. Both the tent and the Whitstable beach hut she had turned into a sculpture were destroyed in a warehouse fire in east London.

From scandal to institution

In 2002 Modern Art Oxford reopened under its new name with her solo show This Is Another Place. In 2007 she represented Britain at the Venice Biennale with Borrowed Light, only the second woman to be given a solo British Pavilion. She was elected a Royal Academician, and was later appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy, one of the first two women to hold a professorship there since the institution was founded.

Her first major retrospective, Twenty Years, opened in Edinburgh in 2008 and broke the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art's attendance record for a living artist. In 2011 the Hayward Gallery surveyed the whole practice in Love Is What You Want. In 2020 she hung her own work beside paintings by Munch in The Loneliness of the Soul at the Royal Academy, later shown in Oslo, where she was the first artist invited to exhibit alongside him. After treatment for cancer she returned with a body of new painting, shown in 2024 at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, which she called the best show she had ever done. In 2026 Tate Modern devoted a survey of forty years of her work to her, under the title A Second Life.

The work at auction

Emin reaches the saleroom in an unusually wide range of forms: unique paintings and works on paper, monoprints, sewn blankets, neon text pieces, photographs and printed editions. The spread of prices is correspondingly wide. In 2023 Bonhams in London sold an early oil on board, painted while she was involved with Billy Childish and given by her to him, for a low five figure sum including premium. In 2024 Rago sold a signed and numbered sheet from an edition of three hundred for a high three figure sum.

For a buyer the first question is always which category of object is on offer, because a unique monoprint and an offset edition of several hundred are entirely different propositions even when the image looks similar. The edition number, the presence of a pencil signature, the paper, the margins and the condition all matter, and paperwork from the publishing gallery is worth keeping with the sheet.