Latest news with #Emin
The Sun
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
EastEnders fans convinced character has been quietly AXED as new face pops up on screen – did you spot the swap?
EAGLE-EYED EastEnders fans are convinced that a long-standing character has been quietly written out of the show. Their suspicions were sparked when a new face suddenly appeared in Albert Square - but did you spot the swap ? 5 5 Marie Evans, who is played by actress Liz Sweet has been a longtime waitress at the local café owned by Kathy Cotton. Since her debut in 2003, she's made numerous appearances, including notable scenes such as Sharon Watts and Keanu Taylor's wedding. Despite being part of the background for over a decade, it appears Marie may have quietly exited the show. Fans on Reddit have pointed out a new character, a waiter named Emin, with Marie nowhere to be seen—prompting speculation that she has been replaced. One user questioned: 'Have they replaced Marie from the cafe ?' Another chimed: 'I had the same thought. Maybe she is on holiday and he is just covering?!' 'Marie, bestieee, where r u (crying emoji's)' added a third. Emin is no stranger to Albert Square with the waiter making occasional appearances on the show since 2012. But, with his recent and more frequent presence and Marie's absence fans are wondering if she has been axed altogether. Fans of the BBC soap are also convinced that a huge change is coming on the show as they notice major clue in a now-deleted post shared to the show's TikTok account. EastEnders horror as as car plunges into a river in explosive trailer EastEnders shared a new behind the scenes video featuring some of the stars. A clip on social media shows the actors that play Harry Mitchell (Elijah Holloway) and his on-screen mother Nicola Mitchell (Laura Doddington). The actresses that play Avani (Aaliyah James) and Priya (Sophie Khan Levy) were also on set in front of the Vic. However, fans have noticed that a sign that was placed on the door of the Vic, indicating that the infamous boozer would up for sale in an upcoming plot. One fan took to the Walford Web fan forum as they wrote: "Rumours that the Vic could be up for sale based on the latest TikTok." Fans couldn't help but flood the comments section with remarks, as they think this could have something to do with Max Branning's return. Another fan posted: "Yeah, definitely looks like The Vic up for sale. Max back taking over The Vic." While a third commented: "Coming in and immediately throwing the Carter-Knights out of The Vic ain't gonna earn Wadey any brownie points with me." 5 5 5
New York Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
British Art in a New Light
On the campus of Yale University, two art museums housed in landmark modernist buildings — each designed by Louis I. Kahn — sit directly across the street from one another. One, the Yale University Art Gallery, with an encyclopedic collection of about 300,000 objects, draws close to a quarter million people annually. The other, the Yale Center for British Art, with its specialized collection of more than 100,000 works from the 15th century to the present, brings in less than half that traffic. The British center is now aiming to even up those visitor numbers. It reopened in March after a two-year closure for conservation of the skylights and lighting throughout the building — the acclaimed architect's last realized project, which opened in 1977 and is widely considered an artwork in itself — and with a fresh exhibition philosophy. A piece by Tracey Emin, who came to fame as one of the so-called Young British Artists in the 1990s alongside peers like Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, inaugurates a new program of contemporary works in the lobby. Her glowing sculptural installation, with yellow neon lighting proclaiming in script 'I loved you until the morning' on a mirrored wall in the museum's entrance court, is visible from the street. It serves as an 'invitation' at the front door, said Martina Droth, the center's director, who was appointed in January after working with its collections for 16 years, most recently as chief curator. 'The envelope of the building doesn't scream museum; it's a little austere,' she said. 'I'm hoping that it signals to people there are things here for them.' In two inaugural exhibitions upstairs, large gestural paintings on the second floor focused on the female body by Emin — who established her reputation with confessional, ramshackle sculptural installations — have unexpected resonance with atmospheric landscapes on the third floor drawn from the center's almost 3,000 works by J.M.W. Turner, who was born almost 200 years before Emin and, like her, counted the English seaside town of Margate as an important second home. This pairing reflects the center's new curatorial approach, Droth said, showcasing the depth and richness of its historical collections 'and then taking those threads into the present moment with someone like Tracey, who absolutely sees herself in the lineage of Margate, famous for Turner and now famous for Tracey, and in those sort of painting traditions.' Emin's show, her first solo museum exhibition in North America, may introduce the artist to younger viewers or reintroduce her to those who remember 'Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,' an exhibition that caused a public stir when it traveled to the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. There, Emin showed a tent embroidered with the names of everyone she had ever shared a bed with. 'Showing Tracey here is just a completely different proposition to showing her in Britain, where she's really a public figure and there's so much baggage around her,' said Droth, who organized the show. She has chosen to focus on Emin's painting, which she had struggled with at the Royal College of Art and abandoned early in her career. She resumed the medium after being selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007, when she began to make paintings that center on the subjectivity of the female figure. Since the death of her mother in 2016, Emin has devoted herself to painting and bronze sculpture. In 2017, Emin bought a home and studio in Margate — where she had a difficult upbringing and was raped at 13 — and has spent most of her time there since 2020. (She also has a home in London.) 'She's depicting the body usually, but it's about the feeling of the body and an atmosphere and a mood,' said Droth, of Emin's paintings that make analogies between her own expressive brushwork and Turner's squalling seascapes. In the painting 'And It Was Love' (2023), which depicts a naked woman splayed across the canvas and a dark form in a wash of deep sunset red between her bent legs, 'you don't really know whether this is a medical emergency, a sexual scene, pleasure, pain,' Droth said. 'It's all of those things.' She noted the faint trace of the stoma on the figure's abdomen connected to a urostomy bag. (In 2020, Emin was diagnosed with bladder cancer and had radical surgery.) Reached by phone in Margate, Emin, now 61, described Turner — who lived part-time with his mistress just minutes from Emin's studio — as 'an early expressionist' and said she loved the 'modesty involved' in showing her work in the context of the British center's collection. 'There's a lot of people who might take my work more seriously now, simply because of the subject matter,' she said. 'I have a very strong opinion on being a woman and I think people understand now that I'm not screaming — I'm just making a point of showing the experiences that women go through.' She wrote a poem to Turner, and to their shared love of Margate's winter sunsets, which is included in a 2024 publication by the center that reproduced his last sketchbook. If Emin thinks about Turner, obviously Turner — born 250 years ago this year — didn't think about Emin. Lucinda Lax, the center's curator of paintings and sculpture who organized the Turner exhibition — the center's first since 1993 — called him 'the father of modern art.' She has included 'Margate' (circa 1822), Turner's view of the newly built seaside resort, with broken ships and workers eking out a living in the foreground, and 'Wreckers' (1834), featuring a tumultuous sea and abbreviated figures scavenging what they can from wreckage. 'He's really trying to bring out the experience, both physically and psychologically, of being part of a particular environment,' Lax said, 'where there's a real sort of sense of the splash of the sea and the whip of the wind.' Lax has also led the fourth-floor re-installation of the permanent collection. 'For the first time, we've got the whole chronological span of British art that's represented in our holdings here on one floor,' said Lax, who has integrated contemporary works by artists including Yinka Shonibare and Cecily Brown into galleries that used to end with the 19th century. She hopes to 'open up questions about empire, gender, the role of women.' As universities are in jeopardy of having funding cut by the government, which has flagged the use of words including 'gender' or 'women' on institutional websites, the British center is not shying away from 'engaging a diverse range of perspectives in dialogue with British art and history,' Droth said. The museum's annual operating budget of almost $39 million is funded almost entirely from the Paul Mellon endowment, the center's founder who donated his holdings of British art that account for almost 80 percent of its collection. Yale is widely regarded as having the greatest collection of British art outside of Britain, said Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum in London, who views the pairing of Emin and Turner as inspired. 'For a younger generation, Tracey's work and way of talking about difficult and uncomfortable things with complete honesty is probably very resonant,' Cullinan said, referring to topics such as abortion, surviving abuse and working-class struggles. 'I think that there was a lot of snobbery around those conversations and an attempt to shut them down as being embarrassing or vulgar,' Cullinan added, noting how the art establishment had put Emin in a box early on. 'Now we recognize that those are not just important, but necessary.'
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Madonna takes train into New Haven for Yale Center for British Art exhibit
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (WTNH) — Madonna graced New Haven with her presence last week, visiting the new exhibit of a friend and fellow artist. The iconic pop singer posted to Instagram Thursday, saying she took the train to Yale University to see 'Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning' at the Yale Center for British Art. Paige Bueckers celebrates championship win with Jimmy Fallon In the post, she revealed a love for trains and for Emin, who she's known since her daughter Lourdes 'Lola' Leon was a child. 'I have enormous respect and admiration for her. She's the 21st century Frida Kahlo,' Madonna mused about Emin. Madonna also said she loved being on the Yale campus and didn't want to leave being surrounded by 'so many great minds.' 'I wanted to stay and get my PhD. Can you guess in what subject?' she asked her Instagram following. Bridgeport's Soundside Music Festival announces 2025 lineup According to the British museum, Emin is known for her dynamic and autobiographical works, which often express themes of love, loss, hope and grief. 'With honesty and deep feeling, her art draws on her personal experiences of illness, intimacy, and sexuality to confront broader concerns about women's bodies and health,' the museum states. This exhibit is the first major presentation of the artist's work in a North American museum. It features paintings dating back to 2007. Emin's work will be on display through Aug. 10, 2025. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New European
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Tracey Emin: ‘Brexit was hideous and heinous'
Ever the Europhile, Emin is delighted to be in Italy, even more so because despite her pronounced international acclaim, this is the 62-year-old artist's first institutional solo show in the country. It's a privilege that she can enjoy only on account of her international status, and very much in spite of the economic and cultural fallout of Brexit. Tracey Emin is a passionate Remainer. 'I am ridiculously pro-Europe. I see Britain leaving Europe as one of the most hideous, heinous things that any nation could have done,' the artist tells me over a pot of green tea upstairs at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, where over 60 of her works have just been installed in a new show called Sex and Solitude. 'You've got to be a really big artist now to show in Europe because of all the taxes and the costs,' says Emin, who spends part of her time working from a studio in the South of France. The show spans three decades of Emin's career and represents her restless creative experiments in drawing, painting, embroidery, print-making and more recently, bronze sculpting. It – didn't stop – I didn't stop. Photo: Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels I Do Not Expect, 2002. Photo: Ela Bialkowska/Okno Studio You Should Have Saved Me, 2023. Photo: Stephen White A discreet blue neon sign bearing the exhibition title interrupts the Renaissance façade of the Palazzo Strozzi, and once over the threshold, visitors are confronted with an immense bronze sculpture of a truncated body, bent over on all fours, haunches raised in agony, ecstasy, or both. As to be expected from the title, sex is everywhere: poems to past lovers pulse in vivid neon writing (one of the artist's favourite mediums since the 1990s) and entanglements of embracing bodies are rendered in large, dripping paintings, or small, amorphous sculptures, fretfully cast in bronze. 'For a long time, sex was my way of exploring the world. Whether good or bad, it was sexual energy that drove me,' Emin says. Both the 'good' and 'bad' course through the pieces in the show: titles of the works range from reveries of tenderness and erotic satisfaction, to expressions of loneliness, violent trauma and the frustrations of desire and its aftermath. The artist has always been candid about her formative experiences of rape and abortion, and spectres of both haunt her images, sometimes appearing in paintings as unresolved forms inside bodies, or sometimes as the traumatic driver for key works. Included in the Florence show is a reconstruction of an installation piece from 1996, called Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, which Emin performed in a studio space within a museum in Stockholm. Sequestering herself for the duration of one menstrual cycle, she worked, naked, and under the public gaze of the museum audience, producing paintings inspired by the canon of male modernist greats from Picasso to Yves Klein. The process was intended to 'exorcise' her relationship to painting, which she had abandoned altogether for six years during a period of intense self-loathing after a traumatic abortion. Emin turned the tables on the idea of the conventional, passive female nude in the studio who waits to be translated to canvas in an expression of the male artist's genius. Instead, she presented herself as both artist and subject while also addressing aspects of female sexuality such as menstruation and abortion, which are almost unanimously absent from the walls of the museum. In Emin's hands, sex, for better or for worse, becomes the creative fuel that was once the preserve and privilege of male artist (think of the priapic Picasso and his many conquests, or Renoir, who is alleged to have said 'I paint with my prick'). Now a seminal work of feminist art, it is one of the most conceptually compelling pieces in the show; its considered critique of gender bias in art history contrasting with the majority of the recent paintings on display, which Emin insists are produced in moments of unfiltered creative flow and are not premeditated or contrived with any narrative. I offer my thoughts on readings of her painted bodies as disfigured by pain or desire, but she doesn't want to be pinned down by interpretations. 'I don't think about that when I'm painting,' she volleys back at me, 'I'm just painting.' Close-knit creative collaborator and studio director Harry Weller assists in these painting sessions, often in the small hours of the morning, spinning the large canvases around on their axes as paint drips, and sprawls. It's from these seemingly automatic marks that images and ideas emerge as a starting point to develop, with titles only given at the end of the process. The show takes the viewer on a trajectory of bodily vitality to bodily morbidity, we pass from one room showing a looped video of monoprints of a woman with legs spread, pleasuring herself (Those Who Suffer Love), to a quiet suite of paintings in ghostly pastel blues produced after Emin's bladder cancer diagnosis in 2020, during a time of multiple endings, including the death of her much-loved cat and leaving her east London home. Elsewhere, crimson acrylic paint flows across surfaces as if from an open wound, and painted gestures to the stoma bag and tube that Emin now permanently wears after her cancer surgery are frequent. It's this attention to suffering and mortality that finds certain parallels with the historical art heritage of Florence, where paintings of the wounded broken body of Christian iconography are never far away. Around the corner in the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, a life-size depiction of a crucified Christ oozes with blood from a wound in his side. In one room of the show, these connections are made explicit in a series of bronze crucifixions of an unexpectedly female body, patinated in white. In another work in the same room, made in Emin's trademark applique style, the stitched words compare falling in love and sexual ecstasy to a type of crucifixion. Although the artist's most explicit artistic homages have been to the expressionists Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch, Emin tells me how she would spend time studying the collection of Italian Renaissance paintings at the National Gallery in London when she was a student at the Royal College of Art, and dare to imagine her works on the walls alongside them. Seeing her works hanging in the Palazzo Strozzi, a building whose history sits in the very cradle of Italian Renaissance art, and history feels like a satisfying culmination of those early ambitions and a way of inserting herself into a long tradition of painting about the human condition. 'You name it, it's here, from Giotto to Fra Angelico, and then I'm here, I'm in the centre of it, and I'm a woman making this work about much the same kind of things really, so it all makes sense,' she says. For curator and Palazzo Strozzi director Arturo Galansino, Emin's ability to resonate with contemporary audiences defines her status as what he terms 'one of the world's most important contemporary artists'. He says: 'We can identify ourselves in her pain, her sorrow, her strength. In Italy, and particularly here in Florence, there's a heightened sense of tradition, and we want to show our audiences that contemporary art is not a different, distant world.' I was interested in how Emin would be received by a potentially more conservative Italian public, less acclimatised to Emin's visceral themes. 'I think Florentines are intellectual, I think they understand that it's all wrapped up in emotional content,' she says. She is visibly delighted to be showing in Italy, but like many of her generation who wished to remain in Europe, Emin is also doleful for a younger generation of Britons with less freedom to explore the world beyond British borders since Brexit. 'Young people used to move around and experience life, they can't do that any more,' she says. She sees the impact also extending to arts education in the UK, with an art school culture that is becoming 'more insular and less connected'. The artist also sees the current conflict in Ukraine and the encroaching military mobilisation of Europe as a once unthinkable result of the fateful referendum. 'When I was on Newsnight [in 2016], talking about why I thought Brexit was bad, I said it would be the beginning of an outbreak of war in central Europe. People laughed at me.' It's refreshing to see the artist through the eyes of the Italians. Familiar to British audiences as the reliably outré provocateur of the 1990s Young British Art movement turned Dame of the British Empire, here in Florence the complexity, legacy and nuance of Emin's work coalesces. Offsite, in a tiny velvet-upholstered cinema room at the Palazzo Gucci, an artfully curated selection of video works run on a loop in the intimate nine-seater cinema, providing a contextual counterpoint to the Palazzo Strozzi exhibition. Among them is Emin's 1998 video, Riding for a Fall, which unexpectedly made me overflow with nostalgia. Shot on Super 8 film, Emin subverts the macho cowboy archetype as she rides a pony on the beach in her home town of Margate, full of swagger, eyeing the camera seductively, Stetson piqued, and with her shirt open to reveal her bra. 'Go ahead and have your fun girl… you're riding for a fall' drawls Delroy Wilson on his 1977 reggae track, played over the top. It is raw and wry, and sexy and melancholy and crackles with soul, but somehow feels very new, or at least ahead of its time. Emin's work may no longer have the propensity to shock as it once did, three decades ago when she made tabloid headlines with her 1999 Turner Prize-nominated installation My Bed, which presented the remnants of a depressive episode after the end of an affair, complete with soiled underwear, empty vodka bottles and condoms. She acknowledges how the reception of her work has changed but insists on how necessary her consistent themes remain, from exploring authentic female sexual desire, to testimonies of trauma, abortion and disease. 'People need to know what women are thinking,' she says, 'if only because they are 50% of the population.' She sees her work and its inclusion in big art institutions such as the Palazzo Strozzi as a way of legitimising and normalising expressions of female experience that have been shrouded in taboo. Recent punitive legal measures controlling women's reproductive freedoms, such as the overturning of Roe v Wade in the United States, are also reflective of a broader contemporary relevance for the topics Emin tackles. 'People used to say I was moaning, but let me moan about these things in Texas and see what happens,' she says. Tracey Emin: Sex And Solitude is at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, until July 20
Euronews
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Tracey Emin's Sex and Solitude: An unmissable exhibition of love, loss and healing in Florence
ADVERTISEMENT Florence is a city that worships the body - smooth, perfect, immortalised in marble. But Tracey Emin has never been interested in perfection. In Sex and Solitude , her first major solo exhibition in Italy, she brings a different kind of body to Palazzo Strozzi - one that aches, bleeds, collapses, and survives. Wander into the courtyard of the Renaissance palace, built in 1489, and you'll find her colossal bronze sculpture I Followed You to the End (2024). The lower half of a fragmented female figure, two crumpled legs, dominates the space - a stark contrast to Florence's many triumphant bronzes, such as Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus with the Head of Medusa , standing victorious in the Loggia dei Lanzi. Emin's sculpture, which was previously shown at London's White Cube Bermondsey last year, denies heroism. Instead, it is raw, broken, and heavy with vulnerability. Inside, Sex and Solitude unfolds as a non-chronological journey through more than 60 brilliant works spanning the 61-year-old artist's career - from early pieces that solidified her reputation as one of the most audacious voices in contemporary art to new works created in the wake of her battle with cancer. Paintings, drawings, film, photography, embroidery, sculpture, and neon come together across 10 thematically curated rooms. From personal pain to public view Emin first made waves in the 1990s alongside Damien Hirst , Sarah Lucas and Marc Quinn, as part of the Young British Artists (YBAs), embracing an unapologetically personal approach to art. She turned her own experiences - heartbreak, childhood trauma, desire, self-destruction - into installations, paintings, and neon declarations that blurred the line between art and autobiography. 'She's a forerunner of feminist artists for sure,' Arturo Galansino, the director of the Palazzo Strozzi and curator of the exhibition, tells Euronews Culture. 'She touches on themes that are really relevant for all kinds of people, all kinds of life experience. And why? Because she's very sincere, because of her openness. There is no filter, there is no structure. We can identify ourselves in her sorrow, her pain, her strength, her bravery." Love Poem for CF by Tracey Emin (2007), on display at the Palazzo Strozzi Credit: Ela Bialkowska Stepping into the first room of the exhibition visitors are greeted with Love Poem for CF (2007), a neon work dedicated to Emin's great love of the '90s, gallery owner Carl Freedman. The giant piece glows in soft pink, its flickering light illuminating the space as it displays the raw intensity of her words: "You put your hand / Across my mouth/ But still the noise / Continues / Every part of my body / is Screaming / Smashed into a thousand / Million Pieces / Each part / For Ever / Belonging to you". As Galansino explains: "Neon is one of the most famous languages used by the artist. Neon is related to her youth in Margate, which was full of neon, in the shops, in the bars, in the restaurants. It's a part of her autobiography. And her writings have become really iconic. The strength of these texts is undeniable, and Tracey proves herself as both a great writer and a great poet." Words are at the core of Emin's art - not just in her neon pieces or appliquéd blanket pieces such as I do not expect , but in the way she titles her works. They're declarations, accusations and raw confessions. Neon always has a seedy connection. But then I think it's sexy too. It's spangly, it's pulsating, it's out there, it's vibrant... For me it's always had a beautiful allure Tracey Emin Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), displayed at the Palazzo Strozzi Credit: Ela Bialkowska The photographic series, 'Naked Photos', displayed at the Palazzo Strozzi. Credit: Ela Bialkowska In the next room is one of the show's centrepieces Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), a notorious performance-installation in which Emin locked herself in a room at a Stockholm gallery, stripped naked, and painted continuously for three and a half weeks (the time between menstrual cycles) under the watchful eyes of the public. For Emin, it was an act of artistic rebirth - after years of not painting following an abortion, she reclaimed her creativity. The installation has been faithfully recreated for Sex and Solitude - complete with paintings that appropriate iconic works by male artists like Picasso , Munch and Rothko , along with empty beer cans, a bowl of oranges, and hanging underwear. A three-piece photographic series, Naked Photos , documenting Emin's time spent in the room, accompanies the installation. Displayed on the wall behind the installation, a quote from Emin reads: "I stopped painting when I was pregnant. The smell of the oil paints and the turps made me feel physically sick, and even after my termination, I couldn't paint. It's like I needed to punish myself by stopping the thing I loved doing the most. I hated my body; I was scared of the dark; I was scared of being asleep. I was suffering from guilt and punishing myself, so I threw myself in a box and gave myself three and a half weeks to sort it out. And I did." A wide view of the room titled "Coming Down From Love" inside Tracey Emin's 'Sex and Solitude' exhibition Credit: Ela Bialkowska 'I waited so Long' 2022 by Tracey Emin Credit: Tracey Emin/Palazzo Strozzi Elsewhere, themes of love, sexual desire, suffering, spirituality, the afterlife, motherhood, and healing run wild. Her figurative paintings - torn by energy, colour, and abstraction dominate the show and its two defining forces: sex and solitude . One particularly attention grabbing painting, scrawled with a frustrated urgency, declares: "I WANTED YOU TO FUCK ME SO MUCH I COULDN'T PAINT ANY MORE." In perhaps the show's most intimate room, Emin turns her focus to the isolation and indeed solitude experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic - a period of collective uncertainty that held a uniquely profound significance for her. In the summer of 2020, she received a life-altering cancer diagnosis. A haunting series of paintings from this period depict interiors and self-portraits in a melancholic blue-grey palette. They take on a quiet, ghost-like quality. After extensive surgery, including the removal of her bladder, uterus, cervix, part of her bowels, and half of her vagina, Emin is now cancer free. Every image has first entered my mind, travelled through my heart, my blood—arriving at the end of my hand. Everything has come through me. Tracey Emin Tracey Emin poses ahead of the opening of her show 'Sex and Solitude' at Florence's Palazzo Strozzi Credit: Palazzo Strozzi Wide view of the final room of Tracey Emin's 'Sex and Solitude' at the Palazzo Strozzi Credit: Ela Bialkowska For longtime admirers of Emin, the unmissable Sex and Solitude reaffirms her lifelong commitment to turning personal pain into raw, unflinching art. For newcomers, it's an introduction to an artist who has made vulnerability her greatest strength. But what seems like an intimate glimpse into her world is, in fact, an invitation to examine our own. As Emin has said before: "I want people to feel something when they look at my work. I want them to feel themselves. That's what matters most." Sex and Solitude runs until 20 July 2025 at Florence's Palazzo Strozzi.
