Tracey Emin is not scared of dying. She came close to it four years ago when she was diagnosed with squamous cell bladder cancer and was given six months to live. Now in remission, Emin lives with a stoma, a small, sometimes bloody opening in her abdomen that allows her urine to be diverted to a urostomy bag she carries with her everywhere she goes, stylishly kept inside a Victoria Beckham makeup bag.
Her stoma is the subject of a new film being shown at White Cube in London alongside around 40 new paintings and two new bronzes—many of the works have taken on a spiritual dimension. In the film, “there’s a reference to the wound of Christ and a reference to suffering”, Emin says. “There’s so much suffering going on right now—it’s not that we need to be reminded of it, we need to be reminded to try and stop it. It’s about the seriousness of life and the fragility of it all.”
Her paintings are increasingly populated with figures that look like martyred saints, some crowned with halos. Ascension, a modestly sized bronze hung at the very end of the Bermondsey gallery’s long entrance corridor, appears like a crucifixion might at the end of a chancel. In another work, Time to Go, Charon, the ferryman of the Greek underworld emerges from swathes of red paint.
Tracey Emin, More Love Than I can Remember (2024) © Tracey Emin. Photo © White Cube (Eva Herzog)
Putting the show together, Emin says it dawned on her that a theme was emerging, though she insists it was not planned. “I realised a lot of the paintings I was doing are quite spiritual, which is about time because I need it,” she says. “Some people need to come out about lots of things, and I need to express how much I believe in all of these other worlds. I need it in my work to give me some kind of solace and understanding of who I am as I get older.”
The title of the show, I followed you to the end, hints at the end of a four-year relationship Emin recently had; some of her new paintings feature a man and woman curled up together in bed. It also points quite clearly to the end of life—Emin’s own or other people’s.
One painting depicts a bridge, possibly the Medway Bridge, which Emin says featured heavily in her early 20s when she lived in Rochester and attended the Maidstone College of Art. “I was thinking about this bridge,” she says. “It’s also something that existed in my dreams, it really is a place from death to life. I see my mum on this bridge.” Initially Emin painted the female figure lying on a bed, “but I realised the bed was a bridge”, she says. “And then I painted her sitting up, and I thought, ‘this is good, she’s not even dead or dying, she’s transcending. She’s going up. There’s somewhere else to go’.”
Despite her cancer diagnosis, Emin’s fearlessness in the face of death is not new. “I’ve confronted death before, it’s something that’s always been within me,” she says.
Tracey Emin, The End of Love (2024) Photo: ©Tracey Emin © White Cube (Eva Herzog)
The White Cube show is Emin’s 11th solo exhibition with the gallery and is her most comprehensive painting show to date. Though she has been painting for almost 20 years, it is still not the medium she is best known for. And her confidence is only now really setting in. “It’s taken me all of this time to get up this North Face and understand what is really important to me, and it’s painting,” she says.
It was around the time of her Venice Biennale presentation in 2007 that Emin first started painting again, but she baulked at the idea of showing the large canvases she had been working on. “Venice was really bad timing for me, because I had decided that I was just going to paint, and I wasn’t looking at anything else. I was doing all these really, really big paintings,” she says. “And then, don’t ask me why, stupidly at the last minute I didn’t have the confidence to show them all, because that’s not what I do. I usually show a bit of everything. If I’d shown the best of Tracey, Venice would have been my blankets—big, shock statements. But I didn’t want that. I wanted to be a painter. And that was in 2007 and I’ve already been painting properly for about a year.”
Just before the pandemic, Emin returned to her hometown of Margate in Kent, a move that has afforded her space to create large paintings, when she is physically able to. Her cancer diagnosis also spurred her to create a lasting legacy, opening an art school and studio complex in 2023. Alongside her commitment to her painting, it is palpably one of the things Emin is most proud of. “I’d love to have a Munch painting, I could have a Munch painting, but instead I’ve got an art school and artist studios, and that’s what I want to spend my money on, because I believe in art,” she says. “Me doing this in the community where I come from and where I live is changing things for a lot of people. I’m literally showing people what art can do and how it can make a difference.”
Since Emin made the move, Margate has been a magnet for new galleries and art spaces. “It’s really happening in the art scene, it’s brilliant. I’m proud about moving the epicentre a little bit, that’s always good and healthy,” she says.
For Emin, “coming home” has had a profound effect. “When you’re told you’ve probably got six months to live, you start thinking, ‘Oh my god, what have I done?’ And I thought, ‘What do I do? Drop dead being a mediocre YBA from the 90s, I don’t think so, I’d better pull my socks up.’ But I didn’t know it was going to turn out this way with Margate and everything, and the idea of going home, it’s amazing,” she says. “Margate has really changed, and I’ve really changed, it’s a really good landing. And I feel really happy there. While life is more gentle for me in Margate, I can then be more fierce with what I have to do.”
As for her own afterlife—and that of her work—Emin recognises she cannot control how or where her art is resold. But she does have one card in her back pocket. “Me and [creative director] Harry [Weller] have a list of people who my work must not be shown with when I’m dead. And if they do, I’ll come back and haunt them,” she says.