Tracey Emin, CBE, RA (; born 3 July 1963) is an English player known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. Emin produces operate in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the “enfant terrible” of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician.
In 1997, her work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, a tent appliquéd with the names of everyone the artist had ever shared a bed with, was shown at Charles Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition held at the Royal Academy in London. The thesame year, she gained considerable media exposure bearing in mind she swore repeatedly in a come clean of drunkenness upon a live drying programme called The Death of Painting on British television.
In 1999, Emin had her first solo exhibition in the United States at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, entitled Every Part of Me’s Bleeding. Later that year, she was a Turner Prize nominee and exhibited My Bed – a readymade installation, consisting of her own unmade dirty bed, in which she had spent several weeks drinking, smoking, eating, sleeping and having sexual intercourse even though undergoing a mature of unfriendly emotional flux. The artwork featured used condoms and blood-stained underwear.
Emin is as a consequence a panellist and speaker: she has lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (2010), the Royal Academy of Arts (2008), and the Tate Britain in London (2005) about the contacts between creativity and autobiography, and the role of subjectivity and personal histories in constructing art.
In December 2011, she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy; with Fiona Rae, she is one of the first two female professors in the past the Academy was founded in 1768.
Emin lives in Spitalfields, East London.
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