TRACEY EMIN

Tracey Emin’s bed

A public artist, a woman who has washed her dirty laundry in the square, who has exposed herself in a total way, offering her very person to the public, revealing passions, fears and secret sentiments, which she has embroidered on the cloth of the pain of the violence suffered as a child and who since she was an exuberant and terrible little girl has an always opposed the irony and her disarming frontality to the world’s incomprehension.

Today, at nearly 50 years of age, Tracey Emin is truly affirmed, one of the main personalities of that generation of English artist who jumped into the limelight in the 1990s and who between furore and provocation have earned a place in Heaven, but it hasn’t always been that way.

In her installations of private rooms and reconstructed chambers, in her tender and crude patchwork of piebald colours were revealed the most intimate moments of her biography, writing offensive phrases or personal insults, with the reassuring and familiar technique of the grandmother’s cushions or blankets.

In the work that won the Turner Prize in 1999, she sewed inside a small camping tent, all the names of people that had slept with her, among whom were family members, friends and lovers starting in 1963 (the date of her birth in London, to an English mother and a Turkish father).

In recent times, the often furious tones of her poems and of the pages of her diary realised in fabric, are softened and sweetened, a sign that the maturity of this shameless and tormenting artist has gifted her with a new, regained serenity.