Tracey Emin’s Sex and Solitude: An unmissable exhibition of love, loss and healing in Florence
Working till 20 July 2025, the mesmerising present spans greater than 60 of Emin’s works, from neon confessions to visceral work and haunting bronzes.
Florence is a metropolis that worships the physique – easy, excellent, immortalised in marble. However Tracey Emin has by no means been fascinated about perfection. In Intercourse and Solitude, her first main solo exhibition in Italy, she brings a special sort of physique to Palazzo Strozzi – one which aches, bleeds, collapses, and survives.
Wander into the courtyard of the Renaissance palace, in-built 1489, and you will find her colossal bronze sculpture I Adopted You to the Finish (2024). The decrease half of a fragmented feminine determine, two crumpled legs, dominates the house – a stark distinction to Florence’s many triumphant bronzes, corresponding to Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa, standing victorious within the Loggia dei Lanzi. Emin’s sculpture, which was beforehand proven at London’s White Dice Bermondsey final yr, denies heroism. As an alternative, it’s uncooked, damaged, and heavy with vulnerability.
Inside, Intercourse and Solitude unfolds as a non-chronological journey by way of greater than 60 good works spanning the 61-year-old artist’s profession – from early items that solidified her popularity as one of the vital audacious voices in up to date artwork to new works created within the wake of her battle with most cancers. Work, drawings, movie, images, embroidery, sculpture, and neon come collectively throughout 10 thematically curated rooms.
From private ache to public view
Emin first made waves within the Nineteen Nineties alongside Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Marc Quinn, as a part of the Younger British Artists (YBAs), embracing an unapologetically private strategy to artwork. She turned her personal experiences – heartbreak, childhood trauma, want, self-destruction – into installations, work, and neon declarations that blurred the road between artwork and autobiography.
“She’s a forerunner of feminist artists for positive,” Arturo Galansino, the director of the Palazzo Strozzi and curator of the exhibition, tells Euronews Tradition. “She touches on themes which might be actually related for every kind of individuals, every kind of life expertise. And why? As a result of she’s very honest, due to her openness. There is no such thing as a filter, there is no such thing as a construction. We will determine ourselves in her sorrow, her ache, her energy, her bravery.”
Entering into the primary room of the exhibition guests are greeted with Love Poem for CF (2007), a neon work devoted to Emin’s nice love of the ‘90s, gallery proprietor Carl Freedman. The large piece glows in tender pink, its flickering gentle illuminating the house because it shows the uncooked depth of her phrases: “You set your hand / Throughout my mouth/ However nonetheless the noise / Continues / Each a part of my physique / is Screaming / Smashed right into a thousand / Million Items / Every half / For Ever / Belonging to you”.
As Galansino explains: “Neon is likely one of the most well-known languages utilized by the artist. Neon is expounded to her youth in Margate, which was stuffed with neon, within the retailers, within the bars, within the eating places. It is part of her autobiography. And her writings have change into actually iconic. The energy of those texts is simple, and Tracey proves herself as each an awesome author and an awesome poet.”
Phrases are on the core of Emin’s artwork – not simply in her neon items or appliquéd blanket items corresponding to I don’t anticipate, however in the best way she titles her works. They’re declarations, accusations and uncooked confessions.
Within the subsequent room is likely one of the present’s centrepieces Exorcism of the Final Portray I Ever Made (1996), a infamous performance-installation by which Emin locked herself in a room at a Stockholm gallery, stripped bare, and painted repeatedly for 3 and a half weeks (the time between menstrual cycles) underneath the watchful eyes of the general public. For Emin, it was an act of inventive rebirth – after years of not portray following an abortion, she reclaimed her creativity. The set up has been faithfully recreated for Intercourse and Solitude – full with work that applicable iconic works by male artists like Picasso, Munch and Rothko, together with empty beer cans, a bowl of oranges, and hanging underwear. A 3-piece photographic sequence, Bare Images, documenting Emin’s time spent within the room, accompanies the set up.
Displayed on the wall behind the set up, a quote from Emin reads: “I finished portray once I was pregnant. The odor of the oil paints and the turps made me really feel bodily sick, and even after my termination, I could not paint. It is like I wanted to punish myself by stopping the factor I cherished doing essentially the most. I hated my physique; I used to be terrified of the darkish; I used to be terrified of being asleep. I used to be affected by guilt and punishing myself, so I threw myself in a field and gave myself three and a half weeks to type it out. And I did.”
Elsewhere, themes of affection, sexual want, struggling, spirituality, the afterlife, motherhood, and therapeutic run wild. Her figurative work – torn by power, color, and abstraction dominate the present and its two defining forces: intercourse and solitude. One notably consideration grabbing portray, scrawled with a annoyed urgency, declares: “I WANTED YOU TO FUCK ME SO MUCH I COULDN’T PAINT ANY MORE.”
In maybe the present’s most intimate room, Emin turns her focus to the isolation and certainly solitude skilled through the COVID-19 pandemic – a interval of collective uncertainty that held a uniquely profound significance for her. In the summertime of 2020, she acquired a life-altering most cancers prognosis. A haunting sequence of work from this era depict interiors and self-portraits in a melancholic blue-grey palette. They tackle a quiet, ghost-like high quality. After in depth surgical procedure, together with the removing of her bladder, uterus, cervix, a part of her bowels, and half of her vagina, Emin is now most cancers free.
For longtime admirers of Emin, the unmissable Intercourse and Solitude reaffirms her lifelong dedication to turning private ache into uncooked, unflinching artwork. For newcomers, it is an introduction to an artist who has made vulnerability her best energy. However what looks like an intimate glimpse into her world is, actually, an invite to look at our personal.
As Emin has stated earlier than: “I need individuals to really feel one thing once they have a look at my work. I need them to really feel themselves. That’s what issues most.”
Intercourse and Solitude runs till 20 July 2025 at Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi.
