“References of Suffering”: why you should go to Tracey Emin’s new exhibition in London

Damien Hirst’s 1991 programmatic work, where the carcass of a tiger shark “swims” in a formaldehyde tank, was titled “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living”. If so, the body of work of Tracey Emin, Hirst’s fellow Young British Artists, is described in almost the opposite way – “the physical impossibility of love in the mind of the mortal.” Art and life in it, this work, negotiate a special intimate frequency: of reciprocity and the inevitable collapse of its full achievement, of anticipation of loss and doom, of mortality and potential rebirth, of the unbridgeable gulf of understanding. Perhaps people will never fully understand each other. Tracey Emin no one will ever understand.

The validity of this statement could be seen on September 18 at the vernissage of the exhibition “I followed you tothe end,” where viewers walked through the spaces of the White Cube Bermondsey gallery – too safe, too sterile – as if on an entertaining, moderately school-like tour of anatomy rooms. For witnesses of Emin’s existential longing, which has grown strong on the shores of unhappy love, the threshold between physical pain and psychological discomfort, which the characters in her works cross without much difficulty in both directions, seems to be gelled or in another dimension of existence altogether.

The exhibition features 40 new works by the artist. Some will call them “contemporary echoes of the visual aesthetics of Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele”, others will call them “windows into private life” or even “mechanisms for transportation to the creator’s essentiality”. At their core, however, they are an artistic reworking of Emin’s memories of love affairs, a lived experience. Her paintings are born without preliminary sketches, without a pre-formed understanding of the final form. In general terms, Emin’s painting process is as follows: she pours paint on the canvas, reproduces an image, paints over it, applies a layer of another shade, turns the stretcher over, adds a couple of figures, erases one of them, and returns the canvas to its original position. In this case, the private painting is at once a product of an intuitive approach, an act of uncertainty and an attempt to cover up the trauma, to hide the pain of another’s cruelty.

One of the paintings in the exhibition is entitled My Dead Body – A Trace of Life. It is a conjecture that is closer to the truth than not: the desire for love, which expresses itself vividly inside Emin, is opposed to the body’s instinctive desire for self-preservation. No one survives, however: the secluded beds and baths in which the nude figures on the artist’s canvases dwell become a bridge from pleasure to devastation, from life to death.

The dominant piece in White Cube’s southern gallery is a monumental bronze sculpture with a lumpy texture, “I Followedyou to the end”. On the one hand it presents an abstract composition reminiscent of a landscape riddled with ravines, on the other hand it reveals the lower part of the anatomy of the female body. Emin’s own body continues to undergo changes as well. The motifs of intense physicality in her recent works are inextricably linked to her diagnosis of bladder cancer in 2020. In 2021, Emin underwent radical surgery: the removal of the tumor along with the surrounding organs, with the ureters led to surgical openings on her abdomen.

Emin is now constantly accompanied by urinary bags, which she stashes in her VictoriaBeckham purse. A minute-long video in the last room of the gallery, shot by Emin herself, shows close-ups of urostomies – purple growth-holes on her body – visually referring to the halos, stains and paint spills in her paintings.

The female figure on the canvas with the familiar title “I Followed you to the end” is drowned in a cobalt red glow surrounded by handwritten text addressed to former lovers who treated her apparently badly: “You made me all this.” “Fall in love and fall out of love” is an oversimplified, overly masculine formula for the cyclical nature of interpersonal relationships. For Emin, of course, the process is organized in a different progression: “To fall in love – to be tormented – to destroy oneself – to die – to be reborn again”.

The exhibition ‘I followed you to the end’ is open to the public until November 10 at White Cube Bermondsey Gallery (144-152 Bermondsey Street, SE1 3TQ).