There are artists who document their times, and there are artists who tear their work from the fabric of their own bodies. Tracey Emin has always been the latter. Next spring, Tate Modern will stage the largest survey of her career, a vast exhibition of over 90 works spanning four decades. Titled ‘A Second Life,’ the show is more than a retrospective; it is a demarcation line, a stark look at the life and the work before, and the life and the work after. After fame, after trauma, after a confrontation with mortality that has reshaped her body and, with it, her art.
Conceived in close collaboration with Emin, the exhibition serves as a definitive statement. It traces a path from the raw, confrontational works of the 1990s to recent paintings and bronzes, many seen for the first time. This is not a gentle look back. It is an act of unflinching autobiography, charting a course through love, pain, and survival.
A Voice Forged in Fury
The exhibition begins not with a bang, but with a ghost. Visitors will first encounter a series of tiny photographs documenting the paintings Emin made during her art school years in the 1980s. The original canvases are gone, destroyed by the artist after a difficult period in her life. This act of erasure is the starting point. It establishes a practice defined by absence as much as presence, a career built on the ruins of the past.
These ghostly images are shown alongside early video works that cemented her instantly recognisable voice. In Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), she narrates traumatic events from her teenage years in Margate with a disarming frankness that would become her signature. It is here that we meet the artist who would refuse any separation between the personal and the public, using her own story as the raw material for a new kind of art.
Return to Margate
Emin’s relationship with her hometown is a constant, complicated thread. It was the site of her youthful trauma, a place she fled at fifteen. The appliqué blanket Mad Tracey From Margate: Everybody’s Been There (1997) lays this history bare, its hand-stitched phrases and drawings mapping an internal landscape of memory and pain.
Yet, in recent years, Margate has become a sanctuary. Following the death of her mother and her own battle with cancer in 2020, Emin returned permanently. She has since established TKE Studios and the Tracey Emin Artist Residency, a free, studio-based art school that is reshaping the town’s creative life. This return is not just a geographical move; it is a reclamation of narrative. The place that once defined her vulnerability is now the centre of her legacy. It is, in a sense, a perfect metaphor for her entire practice: mining the past not to dwell in it, but to build something new from its foundations.
The Body as Archive
At the core of the exhibition is Emin’s relentless exploration of the female body – as a site of pleasure, trauma, and resilience. Her work is a form of reverse archaeology. Instead of uncovering ancient history, she excavates the strata of her own life, exposing nerve endings with a clarity that can be difficult to witness.
Works directly confront her experiences of sexual assault and abortion. The neon I could have Loved my Innocence (2007) hums with a sorrowful energy, while the video How It Feels (1996) is an unsparing account of a mismanaged abortion, detailing the institutional neglect and misogyny she faced. Shown publicly for the first time is The Last of the Gold (2002), a quilt embroidered with an ‘A to Z of abortion,’ a piece that is at once a personal testament and a public service announcement.
This unflinching gaze continues into her most recent work. Following major surgery for bladder cancer, Emin’s art has engaged directly with her changed body. The recent bronze sculpture Ascension (2024) and stills from a new documentary showing the stoma she now lives with are not pleas for sympathy. They are powerful, defiant statements about the reality of survival.
Crisis and Transcendence
Two installations sit at the heart of the show, acting as fulcrums between her first life and her second. Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996) documents a three-week period where Emin locked herself in a Stockholm gallery to reconcile her relationship with painting, a medium she had abandoned for years. This is followed by My Bed (1998), the Turner Prize-nominated installation that captured the raw aftermath of a breakdown. Together, these works articulate moments of profound crisis, of hitting bottom and finding a way back.
Perhaps the most striking thing is what follows. The exhibition culminates in a gallery of vast, ambitious paintings. The pain is still present, of course, but it is accompanied by a transcendent, almost spiritual quality. These are not the works of an artist winding down, but of one who, having faced death, is more determined than ever to live in the present. As Emin herself has said, this show is a “benchmark… a true celebration of living.” Outside the museum, a monumental bronze, I Followed You Until The End (2023), will stand as a visceral welcome, inviting everyone to experience the power of a life lived, and documented, without compromise.
Tracey Emin: A Second Life will be at Tate Modern from 26th February to 30th August 2026. The exhibition is presented in partnership with Gucci.
