Latest news with #SexandSolitude
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.
Euronews
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Ex-007 star Pierce Brosnan weighs in on Bond's future after Amazon takeover
The first ever Tracey Emin exhibition in Italy, a tribute to Paris' 19th century poster art, Stephen Graham's intense new Netflix drama, and hip-hop band clipping. returns. Here's what's on this week's cultural agenda. ADVERTISEMENT It's almost spring and hopefully the sun is shining wherever you are - but even if not, there's hopefully plenty in this week's recommendations to brighten your days (and nights!) From British conceptual artist Tracey Emin's raw expressions of existentialism in Italy, to late night museum visits in Brussels, a new hip-hop album by clipping., and the return of Michael Fassbender to the big screen, you could say we're blooming excited for what's ahead. Anyway, enough Spring puns. Let's get to it, shall we? Exhibitions 'Roma Pittrice: Female artists at work between the 16th and 18th centuries' 'Roma Pittrice' Monkeys Video Lab Where: Museum of Rome at Palazzo Braschi (Rome, Italy) When: Until 4 May 2025 Rome is revered for its great art, but many of its most talented female artists have been overlooked for centuries. 'Roma Pittrice' - curated by by writer Ilaria Miarelli Mariani and art historian Raffaella Morselli, in collaboration with historian Ilaria Arcangeli - hopes to rectify this. A stunning display of 130 works, many of which have never been seen by the public before, brings attention to 56 female artists that created and studied - often with great struggle - in Rome between the 16th and 19th centuries. Their stories, much like their works, unlock an integral part of Italy's rich cultural history, never again forgotten. 'Tracey Emin: Sex and Solitude' Tracey Emin, 'The End of Love' (2024), acrylic on canvas. Credit: Tracey Emin/White Cube Where: Palazzo Strozzi, (Florence, Italy) When: 16 March - 20 July 2025 Turner Prize-nominated British artist Tracey Emin makes her Italian debut with an exhibition showcasing over 60 works under the themes of sex and solitude. Paintings, sculptures, photography, drawings, neon installations and more capture a raw narrative that's both deeply personal and universally tangible, bringing to light reflections on desire, vulnerability, love and loss. Renowned for her ability to produce audacious art that confronts the very ugliest remnants of existence, Emin's career has been shaped by an honesty that is both sad and beautiful - but always mesmerising to behold. 'Art is in the Street' 'La Rue' by Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, 1896. Credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France Where: Musée d'Orsay (Paris, France) When: 18 March - 6 July 2025 A defining aesthetic of the Belle Époque, illustrated posters were more than just advertisements for theatre and products; they revolutionised the public's relationship with art through accessibility. Paris' Musée d'Orsay, in collaboration with the Bibliothèque nationale de France, have brought together over 300 of these original works to spotlight the social phenomenon, including masters of the craft such as Chéret, Bonnard, Grasset and Toulouse-Lautrec. It's a fascinating dive into the history, development and impact of a culture shifting medium that's now synonymous with the ambience of Parisian culture. ADVERTISEMENT Events St. Patrick's Festival St. Patrick's Day celebrations will soon begin... Canva Where: kilkenny, Ireland When: 14 - 17 March 2025 Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona duit (Happy St. Patrick's Day)! Well, almost. The annual holiday in honour of the Patron Saint Of Ireland officially takes place 17 March, but celebrations begin from Friday as shamrock-decorated revelers take to their local Irish drinking establishments for a pint (or three) of Guinness and communal merriment. While places all over the world take part, the festivities within Ireland itself can't be beaten - especially the city of Kilkenny, where costumed musicians, artists, performers and more enliven the medieval streets with creativity and charming hubbub. It's also the perfect opportunity to fully embrace the beauty and breadth of authentic Irish culture. ADVERTISEMENT Nocturnes Where: Brussels, Belgium When: 13 March - 24 April 2025 Twit twoo, night owls - Brussels is calling. Returning for its 24th edition, the annual Nocturnes event awakens the city's cultural gems for visitors to explore after hours. Not only handy for those that usually struggle to make events during the work week, it also provides a uniquely intimate ambience through the secrecy of nightfall. Many of Brussels' museums take part, staying open until 10pm. It's the opportunity to explore educational spaces in a new light, and a vibrant tribute to cultural heritage. Find the full list of participating venues here. ADVERTISEMENT Movies Black Bag Where: European cinemas When: 14 March When your entire identity is defined by secrecy, how can you trust anything - or anyone? This philosophical quandary sets the pulse for Steven Soderbergh's new erotic thriller, starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as married spies whose relationship takes a turn after Blanchett's character becomes the prime suspect in a plot against the UK. True to Soderbergh's style, it's slick, sexy and strongly character driven, exploring betrayal and the limitations of loyalty. ADVERTISEMENT The Ugly Stepsister 'The Ugly Stepsister' Shudder Where: Norwegian cinemas (and theatres near you soon) When: Now One of our Top Ten Films at this year's Berlinale, this sinister re-telling of Cinderella focuses on the perspective of the princess's stepsister via a gruesome deconstruction of fairy tale values and female beauty standards. In a similar vein to Coralie Fargeat's body horror hit The Substance, it's a no holds barred squirm fest, including feet mutilation, eye surgery and the ingestion (and excretion) of tapeworms. In his review, Euronews Culture's resident film critic David Mouriquand called it 'a fully-formed triumph that heralds a bold and ambitious new cinematic voice'. We also had the pleasure of interviewing its director, Emilie Blichfeldt, whose fascinating insights you can read here. ADVERTISEMENT Television Adolescence When: 13 March Where: Netflix Anything starring Stephen Graham (Boiling Point, This is England) is sure to be gritty, compelling and absolutely nerve shredding. This new four-part series stars the actor - who also co-wrote it with Jack Thorne - as a dad whose teenage son (Owen Cooper) is accused of murdering a school friend. Much like Boiling Point, every episode was filmed in one long continuous shot, offering no reprieve from its sense of all-consuming panic and claustrophobic tension. While admittedly not one to wind down to after a long day, it's powerful viewing with incredible performances that tackle the insidious societal issues affecting young men. ADVERTISEMENT Music clipping.: Dead Channel Sky When: 14 March American experimental hip-hop band clipping. are due to return with their fifth full-length album, a follow-up to 2020's darkly conceptual 'Visions of Bodies Being Burned'. Early release singles like 'Change the Channel' suggest ear-drum dizzying sonic bedlam ahead, the band taking inspiration from William Gibson's sci-fi novel "Neuromancer" in a collection set to be imbued with fizzling dystopic, cyberpunk vibes. Stay tuned for our full review on Friday (14 March). In the meantime, check out our interview with clipping. for their previous album. Album anniversaries: March 2025 ADVERTISEMENT Album anniversaries – March 2025: Kendrick Lamar, M.I.A., Céline Dion. Copyright Top Dawg Entertainment, XL Recordings / Interscope Records, Columbia ...And finally, what better way to begin the week than with a re-visit (or discovery) of some brilliant albums. Every month we handpick a trio celebrating milestone anniversaries, with March featuring a modern hip-hop masterpiece, Canada's greatest export since maple syrup and some UK dancehall-grime-funk. Grab your headphones, settle in, and find out more here.
