88 Facts About Tracey Emin

Tracey Karima Emin is a British artist known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork.

Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is a Royal Academician.

In 1999, Tracey Emin had her first solo exhibition in the United States at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, entitled Every Part of Me's Bleeding.

Tracey Emin is a panellist and speaker: she has lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the Tate Britain in London about the links between creativity and autobiography, and the role of subjectivity and personal histories in constructing art.

Tracey Emin lived in Spitalfields, East London before returning to Margate where she funds the TKE Studios with workspace for aspiring artists.

Tracey Emin was born in Croydon, a district of south London, to an English mother of Romanichal descent and a Turkish Cypriot father.

Tracey Emin was brought up in Margate, Kent, with her twin brother, Paul.

Tracey Emin studied fashion at Medway College of Design.

Tracey Emin graduated with a first class degree in Printmaking.

Also, whilst at Maidstone college of Art, Tracey Emin encountered Roberto Navikas, a name which was later to feature prominently in her "tent".

In 1987, Tracey Emin moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, where in 1989 she obtained an MA in painting.

Tracey Emin's influences included Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, and for a time she studied philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.

In 1993, Tracey Emin opened a shop with fellow artist Sarah Lucas, called The Shop at 103 Bethnal Green Road in Bethnal Green, which sold works by the two of them, including T-shirts and ashtrays with Damien Hirst's picture stuck to the bottom.

In November 1993, Tracey Emin had her first solo show at White Cube, a contemporary art gallery in London.

Tracey Emin said she was drunk, slurred and swore before walking out.

Two years later, in 1999, Tracey Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize herself and exhibited My Bed at the Tate Gallery.

In 2004 Tracey Emin presented Madonna with the UK Music Hall of Fame award.

The term used in the work Kin is a recurring theme of Tracey Emin's to describe those dear to her, her loved ones.

Tracey Emin created a nude drawing of Kate Moss known as Kate, signed and dated as 1 February 2000 in pencil by the artist.

Tracey Emin's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Tracey Emin recorded the incident in the poem, "Poem for a Pissed Off Wife" published in Big Hart and Balls Hangman Books 1994, from which Charles Thomson, who knew them both, later coined the term Stuckism.

Tracey Emin commented that she decided to exhibit in Oxford as museum director Andrew Nairne had always been "a big supporter of my work".

Tracey Emin spoke out angrily against what she perceived as a general public lack of sympathy, and even amusement, at the loss of the artworks in the fire.

Tracey Emin was the second woman to produce a solo show for the UK at the Biennale, following Rachel Whiteread in 1997.

Tracey Emin summed up her Biennale exhibition work as "Pretty and hard-core".

Tracey Emin was interviewed about the Venice Biennale by the BBC's Kirsty Wark in November 2006.

Tracey Emin showed Wark some work-in-progress, which included large-scale canvases with paintings of Tracey Emin's legs and vagina.

Tracey Emin is much more interested in formal values than people might expect, and it shows in this exhibition.

On 29 March 2007, Tracey Emin was made a Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts.

In becoming a member of the Royal Academy Tracey Emin joined an elite group of artists that includes David Hockney, Peter Blake, Anthony Caro and Alison Wilding.

Tracey Emin's art was first exhibited at the Royal Academy as part of the Sensation exhibition in 1997.

Tracey Emin gave a public talk in June 2008 interviewed by art critic and broadcaster Matthew Collings, contemplating her role within the Royal Academy, the Academy's relationship to the contemporary art world, and her perspective, as an artist, on hanging and curating a gallery in the Summer Exhibition.

The first major retrospective of Tracey Emin's work was held in Edinburgh between August and November 2008 attracting over 40,000 visitors, breaking the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art's record for an exhibition of work by a living artist.

Tracey Emin made a new series of outdoor sculptures especially for this solo show.

On 6 October 2011, Tracey Emin opened a site-specific exhibition at a Georgian house on Fitzroy Square.

Tracey Emin was a mentor on the BA Great Britons Programme.

Tracey Emin produced a poster and limited edition print for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, one of only 12 British artists selected.

On 19 July 2012, Tracey Emin carried the Olympic torch through her hometown of Margate.

In December 2020, Tracey Emin had a gallery exhibition containing works by Edvard Munch, entitled The Loneliness of the Soul, at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Tracey Emin selected 19 pieces of Munch's work to be displayed alongside 25 pieces of her own.

The exhibition was re-shown at the newly opened Munch Museum in Oslo, with Tracey Emin being the first artist to show alongside the Norwegian painter.

Tracey Emin had suffered from cancer in the year before the exhibit, and was unsure whether she would be able to see it herself.

Tracey Emin's monoprints are a well documented part of her creative output.

Tracey Emin's monoprints are rarely displayed alone in exhibitions, they're particularly effective as collective fragments of intense emotional confrontation.

Tracey Emin has made several works documenting painful moments of sadness and loneliness experienced when travelling to foreign cities for various exhibitions such as Thinking of You and Bath White I which were from a series of monoprints drawn directly onto the USA Mondrian hotel stationery.

The book was released to coincide with Tracey Emin's show Those who suffer love at White Cube which was mainly a drawings show.

Monoprint drawings of mothers and children that Tracey Emin drew during a pregnancy in 1990 were included in a 2010 joint exhibition with Paula Rego and Mat Collishaw at the Foundling Museum.

Tracey Emin has gifted monoprints to individuals including her brother Paul Tracey Emin and the singer Cat Stevens with whom she shares Cypriot heritage.

Tracey Emin displayed six small watercolours in her Turner Prize exhibition in 1999, and in her New York show Every Part of Me's Bleeding held that same year, known as the Berlin Watercolour series.

Simon Wilson, spokesperson for the Tate, commented that Tracey Emin included the set of tiny Berlin watercolours "as a riposte to the accusation that there are no paintings" in the Turner Prize exhibitions.

Tracey Emin's focus on painting has developed over the past few years, starting with the Purple Virgin acrylic watercolour series of purple brush strokes depicting her naked open legs, and leading to paintings such as Asleep Alone With Legs Open, the Reincarnation series and Masturbating, among others.

Jay Jopling presented a new Tracey Emin painting, Rose Virgin, as part of White Cube's stand at the Frieze Art Fair in London's Regent's Park on 10 October 2007.

Sooke claimed that although Tracey Emin was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy in 2011, she has been taking drawing lessons privately for some years in New York, and that she had been taking sculpture lessons for at least three years.

Tracey Emin gave her readings sitting in the chair, which she had inherited from her grandmother, which became part of Tracey Emin's art, There's A Lot of Money in Chairs.

Tracey Emin collects fabric from curtains, bed sheets and linen and has done so for most of her life.

Tracey Emin keeps such material that holds emotional significance for later use in her work.

Hate And Power Can Be A Terrible Thing, part of the Tate's collection of Tracey Emin's work, is a large-scale blanket inspired in part by Margaret Thatcher due to her involvement in "an attack on 800 boys and men in the Argentinian navy" and other women for example women who steals their friends' boyfriends, Tracey Emin says of this work "about the kind of women I hate, the kind of women I have no respect for, women who betray and destroy the hearts of other women".

Tracey Emin used the chair on a trip Tracey Emin made to the United States in 1994.

Tracey Emin posed in the chair for two of her photographic works while in Monument Valley, in the Arizona Desert.

Tracey Emin has made a large number of smaller-scale works, often including hand sewn words and images, such as Falling Stars, It Could Have Been Something, Always Sorry and As Always.

On 13 April 2007, Tracey Emin launched a specially designed flag made out of fabric with the message One Secret Is To Save Everything written in orange-red letters across the banner made up of hand-sewn swimming sperm.

Tracey Emin called the artwork "a flag made from wishful thinking".

Tracey Emin was interviewed by Alan Yentob during the BBC's Imagine documentary Spiderwoman about Louise Bourgeois, aired in the UK on 13 November 2007.

Tracey Emin has often made use of found objects in her work from the early use of a cigarette box found in a car crash in which her uncle died.

Tracey Emin incorporated stones and rocks which had been thrown through her window in a mixed media piece in her 2005 show.

Tracey Emin loaned this work to the National Portrait Gallery in 2005,.

In September 2007, Tracey Emin announced she would be exhibiting new sculpture work in the inaugural Folkestone Triennial which took place in the Kent town from June until September 2008.

In June 2008 Tracey Emin discussed the Folkestone sculptures, stating the "high percentage" of teenage pregnancies in the Kent town had inspired this latest work.

In late November 2007, it was announced that Tracey Emin was one of six artists to have been shortlisted to propose a sculpture for the fourth plinth in London's Trafalgar Square.

On 6 January 2008, it was revealed Tracey Emin's proposal was a lifesize model of a group of four meerkats, the desert mammal.

Tracey Emin's latest project, commissioned by Oslo Municipality Art Programme, is a 7-metre-tall bronze sculpture, The Mother, to be unveiled on Museum Island, outside the new Munch Museum, when it opens in 2020.

Tracey Emin withdrew the film from general distribution in cinemas after it was rated with an 18 certificate.

Tracey Emin created a large rollercoaster track with reclaimed timber and metal.

In 2000, Tracey Emin was commissioned, as part of a scheme throughout London titled Art in Sacred Spaces, to collaborate with children on an artwork at Ecclesbourne Primary School in Islington, north London.

Tracey Emin is one of just two women professors to be appointed at London's Royal Academy of Arts since the Academy was founded in 1768.

Tracey Emin openly discusses her 1998 installation My Bed for audiences and interviewers alike.

Feminists critics have described Tracey Emin as using the historical notion of the bedroom and its importance for female experiences, as a site for crude intervention.

In 1998, Tracey Emin duetted with pop singer Boy George on a song called "Burning Up", released on an 18 track audio CD that accompanied the book We love you.

In 2005, Tracey Emin compiled a CD of her favourite music called Music To Cry To, which was released and sold by the UK household furnishings retailer and brand Habitat.

In spring 2020 Tracey Emin was diagnosed with squamous-cell bladder cancer.

Tracey Emin underwent an operation to remove her bladder and several adjacent organs that summer 2020, and this left her in remission, but with a stoma.

Tracey Emin frequently donates original artworks for charity auctions, and has often adopted the role of auctioneer on the charity night to help increase the highest bid.

Tracey Emin has participated in The Independent newspaper's Christmas Appeal for many years, where she has offered for auction bespoke artworks and drawing lessons with the artist.

The Independent newspaper reported in August 2010 that Tracey Emin is thought of as a supporter of the Conservative Party.

Tracey Emin started a petition to save newsagent Ashok Patel's business, which was signed by 1,000 people.

Tracey Emin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to the arts.

Tracey Emin was made an honorary freewoman of Margate in 2022.

In January 2022, Tracey Emin requested that the artwork be removed in response to the Westminster lockdown parties controversy.