“The reason she is the most important British artist of her generation is that she really does have a powerful subject – her life, like anyone’s life, is interesting; it matters. Why not share it? Here she rises to heights of beauty and depths of horror as she shares epiphanies of love and loneliness ... Emin bares her soul by portraying humiliations of the flesh. As the confidence of her drawing seems to break and fail, what’s left is despair.
Born on this day (3 July 1963): fearlessly candid, divisive, and confessional British multi-media artist and Queen of the YBA scene, Tracey Emin. What an artist, what a woman. I’ve always visited every new exhibit of hers over the decades in London and crazily, I feel like I know her. Maybe it’s because Emin shares every joy, heartbreak, trauma, and personal crises in her work (most recently, she’s been gutsily blunt about living with the aftereffects of cancer. “She recaptures the past still bloody and slams it on to canvas with a scream” is how The Guardian’s art critic Jonathon Jones pithily summarizes Emin’s oeuvre). In real terms, I think I’ve only crossed paths with the bad girl of conceptual art once or twice over the years. I vividly remember way back in the early nineties being at an opening night party for something at The Institute of Contemporary Art and being awe-struck when Emin (wearing dark shades) swept past me on the staircase. She was far more glamorous and exciting than any rock star. I still need to see her current retrospective (A Second Life) at Tate Modern before it closes in August. Pictured: the very young “Mad Tracey from Margate” with her then-boyfriend, musician and artist Billy Childish in the early 1980s by Eugene Doyen. How painfully stylish they were: you can easily imagine this duo is a 1950s beatnik couple, or escapees from a French nouvelle vague film.
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