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Forbes
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Tracey Emin, Sex & Solitude At Palazzo Strozzi: A Bold Symphony Of Love, Loss & Survival
Tracey Emin and Arturo Galansino at Palazzo Strozzi on the occasion of the exhibition Sex and Solitude. Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ludovica Arcero, Saywho. Tracey Emin's solo exhibition Sex and Solitude at Florence's Palazzo Strozzi is a profound and intimate exploration of the human condition, presented through over 60 works that span her prolific career. Curated by Arturo Galansino–Director General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi–the exhibition runs until 20th July, 2025 and offers a deeply personal yet universally resonant journey into themes of love, loss, and healing. Tracey Emin: Sex and Solitude is the first major institutional exhibition in Italy dedicated to globally celebrated British artist Dame Tracey Emin. The exhibition's titular themes of sex and solitude are explored through drawings, paintings, photography, embroidery, appliqué, sculptures, and neon installations. Emin's art has always been confessional and raw, and throughout her prolific career she has worn her heart on her sleeve and channelled her experiences of love, lust, passion, illness and recovery into her art. Tracey Emin I waited so Long 2022 acrylic on canvas 183.1 × 183.3 × 3.5 cm Private Collection c/o Xavier Hufkens GalleryCourtesy © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Photo HV-Studio. Since causing a stir in the 90s as one of the founder 'YBAs' and exhibiting her controversial, groundbreaking 1995 artwork Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995–followed by celebrity status and an outspoken appearance on Newsnight–Emin has developed into something of a national treasure in the UK–particularly in her home town of Margate where she has opened the Tracey Karima Emin (TKE) Studios in Margate, a professional artist's studios entirely subsidized by her, with an art school programme called Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR). The British establishment finally stepped up and paid attention to Emin's artistic genius and contribution to the arts in general–and regeneration through the arts of Margate in particular–making her a Dame of the British Empire in 2024. Emin has a long overdue retrospective coming up in February 2026 at Tate Modern, yet–despite an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts where her work was juxtaposed with Egon Schiele's in 2021-Emin hasn't had a major solo show in a UK institution yet (although she did represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007). So the Palazzo Strozzi were ahead of the curve when Director Arturo Galansino invited Emin to present a one-woman survey exhibition at the esteemed Florentine museum. The Italian art world has recognised that Emin is a master of her oeuvre and crowned her with a stunning exhibition in the birthplace of art history–Firenze. Tracey Emin Naked photos – Life Model Goes Mad I 1996 giclée on photo rag paper 53,5 × 53 cm edition of 3, with 2AP Courtesy of the Artist © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Photo © White Cube (Theo Christelis) I spoke to Palazzo Strozzi director Arturo Galansino in Florence about his collaborative vision with Emin on the monumental exhibition, which has been three years in the making. The exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi features a wide range of works by Tracey Emin dating back to her early career through to new works recently exhibited at White Cube in London. So how did Galansino so skilfully curate this survey show from such a wide date range and variety of artworks? Arturo Galansino: 'The exhibition is the result of a long collaboration and discussion with Tracey Emin and her studio director Harry Weller, who is a very important figure. We started this discussion between me, Tracey and Harry about what to put in this exhibition. There are some very recent works, especially the monumental sculpture in the courtyard, which was exhibited at White Cube last autumn and now belongs to the Voorlinden museum in the Netherlands. There are also some very early works. That reflects my desire to give as complete image of Tracey as possible. We have a very diverse range of visitors to Palazzo Strozzi, so our idea was to offer a very complete image of the artist, which makes sense because Florence is where art history was invented. So we want to say that the contemporary artist enters into art history. So the idea was to have a complete portrait of the work of Tracey Emin.' Galansino worked closely with Tracey on the exhibition, visiting her studio in London and creating a maquette of Palazzo Strozzi's galleries envisioning the exhibition's curation. There are works from collections as far afield as Asia and Australia on display at Palazzo Strozzi. Tracey Emin "Sex & Solitude" at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. Photo © Lee Sharrock Sex and Solitude is a rather melancholy, emotionally charged title and Emin really wears her heart on her sleeve through the exhibition. I ask Galansino who came up with the title: 'The title was totally her decision. It's part of her practice: Tracey always starts a project with a title. It's broader than that because words are the starting point. In the exhibition you can see that words are central. She had to think about what she wants to say with this show. So she came up with this very poetic title which is made by two opposite poles of her practice–sex, her senses, the wild life of her youth, and how sex is still an inspiration and important part of her life and work–and solitude. Solitude is the other side of the coin, because she needs to be alone to work. Solitude is not seen as a negative word, but in the sense that philosophers, artists and artists need to be alone to work. The word solitude is also of course related to the very dramatic illness that she had. And she speaks about the how the sickness affected her private and personal life.' Tracey Emin Thriving on Solitude 2020 acrylic on canvas 30.7 x 30.7 x 2.2 cm Private collection © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. A Raw and Unflinching Artistic Journey Emin's art is renowned for its candidness and vulnerability, transforming personal experiences into powerful visual narratives. Her draughtsmanship and effortless ability to capture languid nude forms possesses echoes of the drawings of Egon Schiele–an early 20th century artist she has been deeply influenced by–and also evoke the raw honesty of Gustave Courbet's controversial 1866 painting L'Origine du Monde, which depicted with startling realism the naked pubis of a female nude. Many of the nude drawings and paintings exhibited at Palazzo Strozzi follow the lineage of iconic masters of life drawing from art history, yet Emin puts her own stamp on images of the female nude, refocussing the male gaze with large-scale self-portraits painted with a palette of crimson red and a melancholy blue–perhaps a representation of Emin's near-death experience which involved invasive operations on her body–visceral lines of paint outlining reclining a solitary reclining nude figure and running down the canvas like so many tears. Galansino reflects on the bravery Emin displays through her art: 'She's very brave, very honest, very direct. It's something that our public have never seen before–an artist who is so bold and so willing to open her heart and speak about herself with no filter.' Tracey Emin Exorcism of the last painting I ever made 1996 performance / installation internal dim. 350 x 430 x 430 cm Courtesy of Schroeder Collection and Faurschou Collection © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Courtesy White Cube Sex & Solitude delves into Emin's personal experiences, including her battle with cancer, which profoundly influenced her recent works. A series of paintings from this period, characterized by a melancholic blue-grey palette, reflect her isolation and introspection during recovery. These pieces, along with others like Love Poem for CF (2007)–a neon work dedicated to her great love of the '90s–and Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), an immersive installation documenting a pivotal performance in Emin's career, offer a glimpse into her emotional and physical journey and are testament to her unfiltered expression. Galansino started working on the exhibition in 2022 and approached it as a survey show rather than a retrospective. He explained: 'It's not a retrospective of course; it's more a survey. And it's not chronological, it's thematical. I think it works very well, because it presents the consistency of Tracey on different topics through almost four decades, because we are spanning from the 90s until now.' A Dialogue with the Renaissance At Palazzo Strozzi Emin's monumental bronze sculpture I Followed You to the End (2024) dominates the Renaissance courtyard, presenting a fragmented female form that contrasts starkly with Florence's classical art, emphasizing themes of vulnerability and resilience. The vast sculpture was exhibited at White Cube in 2024 and recalls Egon Schiele's drawing of a nude woman bent over and viewed from behind, creating a dichotomy of vulnerability and longing. This powerful introduction sets the tone for an astonishing and brave exhibition which delves deep into the psyche of the artist and addresses universal themes of love, lust, loss, illness and fear. Emin's bold sculpture has been installed in the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi as a public sculpture and holds its own in a historic city known for some of the most breathtaking Renaissance architecture and sculpture. Tracey Emin 'Sex & Solitude' at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. Photography © Lee Sharrock Sex and Solitude is not only a reflection of Emin's personal narrative but also engages in a dialogue with the Renaissance tradition embodied in the architecture of Palazzo Strozzi. Her works, often characterized by bold colors and energetic gestures, juxtapose the classical art of Florence. Reinforcing the artistic lineage between the Renaissance and Contemporary, Emin's exhibition will be followed by a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of Fra Angelico, opening on 26th September, 2025. Themes of Love, Loss, and Healing Inside Palazzo Strozzi the exhibition features embroidery, neons, paintings, works on paper curated to represent the opposing yet intertwined poles of sex and solitude, which form the core of Emin's practice. A room inside the exhibition is dominated by a huge neon 'Love Poem' from 2007 with the words You put your hand across my mouth but still the noise continues. Every party of my body is screaming. Smashed into a thousand million pieces. Each pant for ever belonging to you. Emin's love of neon stems from her childhood in British seaside Town Margate and she transforms it into an autobiographical form of visual poetry by creating neon's with her handwriting captured in pink neon. Emin's poetry captures the raw passion bordering on fear of a sexual encounter, and a 2020 painting Coming Down From Love is emblazoned with the words I Wanted You To Fuck Me So Much I Couldn't Paint Any More, representing pure longing and all-encompassing desire with abstract expressionist brushstrokes. A 2009 artwork embroidered with the words I Keep Loving You in pretty pink hues uses textiles to create a calmer, more subdued frame of mind resigned to the acceptance of loving someone. Another highlight is a 2002 textile artwork titled I do Not Expect, a large pink blanket appliquéd with the words 'I do not expect to be a Mother, but I do expect to die Alone', which addresses Emin's experiences of miscarriage and the lost opportunity of becoming a Mother, and also society's expectations of women and the expectation of Motherhood. Tracey Emin I do not expect 2002 appliquéd blanket 264 x 185 cm Sidney, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program by Geoff Ainsworth AM 2018 © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Photo © Stephen White. Courtesy White Cube President of the Palazzo Strozzi foundation Giuseppe Morbidelli says in the exhibition catalogue: 'Emin's strongly autobiographical approach encourages the public to deal with emotions and experiences that usually remain buried deep inside, transforming them into highly symbolic and enlightening existential metaphors–also for this reason the exhibition is helpful in knowing oneself.' Concluding the exhibition are several works made by Emin following her invasive cancer surgery in 2020. In response to the life-changing surgery, Emin created monotype prints exploring the trauma of illness and recovery in a sombre palette of blacks and grays in the tradition of Goya and Manet. Although monochrome in palette, at the heart of these works is Emin's joy at being alive and celebration of the life-affirming power of art. Tracey Emin's Sex and Solitude at Palazzo Strozzi is a compelling exhibition that invites visitors into the artist's world of raw emotion and introspection. Through her unflinching honesty and diverse artistic mediums, Emin creates a space for reflection on the complexities of the human experience. Sex and Solitude is a must-see for those interested in contemporary art that challenges conventions and speaks to the heart. Emin's ability to express a huge range of emotions and encapsulate so many universal themes in her art is what makes her art so engaging and so timeless, and she fully deserves her place in the canon of art history, cemented by this once in a lifetime exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi where some of the most iconic artists originated. Tracey Emin. Sex and Solitude is at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence until 20th July, 2025.
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
