Photography London Group

Tracey Emin - Love is What You Want a retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery
18th May – 29th August 2011

Tracey Emin - Love Is What You Want a retrospective exhibition at the Haywood Gallery

The exhibition Love Is What You Want is a major survey covering every period of her career, revealing facets of the artist and her work that are often overlooked. The exhibition features painting, drawing, photography, textiles, video and sculpture, in works that are by turns tough, romantic, desperate, angry, funny and full of longing. Seldom-seen early works and recent large-scale installations are shown together with a new series of outdoor sculptures created especially for the Hayward Gallery.

Since the early 1990s, Emin (b.1963) has used her own life as the starting point for her art, exposing the most harrowing and intimate details of her personal history. Sometimes confrontational or sexually provocative, her work resonates with the ‘personal political’ legacy of feminist art while at the same time speaking to relationships in general. Disarmingly frank and yet often profoundly private, much of Emin’s art – as this show makes clear – is also animated by her playful and ironic wit.

The exhibition book can be purchased through Amazon: Tracey Emin: Love is What You Want [Paperback]

More information on the exhibition can be found on the Love is What You Want website

Tracey Emin - Art and History

The typically auto-biographical roots of her work and fame can be traced back to the her first solo show at the White Cube gallery called My Major Retrospective, consisting of personal photographs, and photos of her (destroyed) early paintings, as well as items which most artists would not consider showing in public, such as a packet of cigarettes her uncle was holding when he was decapitated in a car crash. This willingness to show details of what would generally be thought of as her private life has become one of Emin's trademarks.

From that show Tracey Emin rose to further prominence and fame through various work, shows and a somewhat infamous odd appearance on a channel 4 panel program. In 1999 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize and exhibited probably one of her most famous pieces My Bed - There was considerable media furore about this, particularly as the sheets of the bed were stained yellow, and the floor surrounding it had items from her room such as condoms, empty cigarette packets, a pair of knickers

Another well-known Tracey Emin work of art is Tent or Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 This has often been misinterpreted as being a list of sexual partners but includes many that she has simply shared a bed with (this work was destroyed in the Momart fire)

Tracey Emin – The photocopied flier for a lost cat

I was intrigued by a comment on her wiki page that photocopied fliers Tracey Emin placed around her home asking for information about her lost cat were taken and kept as collectors items. Is this a consequence of her art and fame, which is highly personal and what some call self-obsessed. If so the creation by Tracey Emin of this flier becomes part of the body of work that she has created over the past twenty years, or is it something that is absurb that only the work the artist decides to create, that wishes to be placed into the public domain as a work should be considered and have value as a piece of art.

Looking into her work it is most certainly the case that the small flier about a lost cat created by Tracey Emin is a part of the body of work and part of any retrospective. I don’t want to suggest what value the flier has but that it has an equal value to other equivalent and similar pieces of work that she has exhibited as works of art.

Trace Emin - Books you may like

Tracey Emin [Hardcover]  A huge collection of Tracey Emins drawings from the last 20 years over 400 pages worth 
Tracey Emin Strangeland Her Autobiography