Tracey Emin British, b. 1963

Tracey Emin has built a practice around the exposure of private experience, confronting love, sexuality, grief and the female body with an uncompromising sense of intimacy. Her work moves between painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, textiles and neon, often incorporating handwritten language and imagery drawn from personal memory. Printmaking, which she studied at Maidstone College of Art, has remained particularly important to her practice. In her monoprints and etchings, loosely rendered figures, restless lines and fragments of text capture the immediacy of emotion, giving form to experiences that resist straightforward expression. Her approach embraces imperfection and spontaneity, allowing the marks themselves to convey vulnerability, desire and psychological tension.

Emin emerged as one of the most prominent members of the Young British Artists in the 1990s, attracting international attention with works such as Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995) and My Bed (1998), for which she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999. She represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and was elected a Royal Academician the same year. Major exhibitions include Love Is What You Want at the Hayward Gallery, London (2011), The Loneliness of the Soul at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2020–2021), and A Second Life at Tate Modern, London (2026), her largest retrospective to date.