About Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin (b. 1963, London) is a British artist who came to attention in the 1990s alongside the Young British Artists. She works in painting, drawing, printmaking, embroidery, neon, sculpture, film and installation, and her work draws on her own memories, relationships and vulnerability. Her installation My Bed (1998), shown when she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999, presented an unmade bed surrounded by personal belongings and became one of the best-known works of contemporary British art. In 2007 she represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale.
Drawing is central to the work of Tracey Emin. Her paintings, drawings and limited edition prints are characterised by quick, expressive lines and, often, handwritten text. In 2023 the National Portrait Gallery in London unveiled her bronze doors, three doors four metres high with 45 relief portraits of women, which she drew first in blue ink. Emin has said that they should represent “every woman, every age and every culture throughout time”. In 2024 four limited edition prints, including There is No Fear, were published by Counter Editions in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery as a fundraising edition for the gallery. Each print reworks one of the portraits from the doors as a lithograph, printed at Counter Studio in Margate.
Emin lives and works between London, Margate and the south of France. In 2023 she opened TKE Studios in Margate, which offers artist studios and a residency programme, and in 2022 she was made Honorary Freewoman of Margate. She became Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2011 and was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her services to the visual arts in 2012.
