Tracey Emin Because Im So Fucking Sexy, I was Born Sexy, And I Will Die Sexy, 2022

Tracey Emin (b. Croydon, 1963) looks to her life for her primary material. With soul-searching candour, she probes the construct of the self but also the very impulse to create. Unfiltered, irreverent, raw, she draws on the fundamental themes of love, desire, loss and grief in works that are disarmingly and unashamedly emotional. ‘The most beautiful thing is honesty, even if it’s really painful to look at’, she has remarked.

A member of the infamous generational cohort known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), Tracey Emin has developed a unique conceptual mode of artmaking that embraces both tenderness and audacity. In era-defining works such as My Bed (1999) and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), Emin mined her most intimate experiences for artistic inspiration.

Tracey Emin's art is confessional, manifested in a rich variety of media and unprecedented in its frankness and the unsparing nature of her self-examination. Her work is frequently highly confrontational, but is redeemed by its honesty, good humor, self-awareness, poetry and ultimate innocence. Although she deals relentlessly with the minutiae of her own life she touches largely on issues that are common to all, not least sexuality, mortality, and the creation of meaning in life. She shares with prominent artists of the past a preoccupation with what it is to be an artist.