Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga hosts 'Tracey Emin ~ 20 Years' |
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| Tuesday, 02 December 2008 02:56 |
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The largest, and most significant showing of Emin’s work to date, this eagerly anticipated exhibition offers the first comprehensive overview of her career. Tracey Emin: 20 Years will have its only Spanish showing in Málaga, bringing together loans from public and private collections around the world. Tracey Emin is one of the best-known artists working in Britain today. Born in London in 1963, she is a central figure in the generation of Young British Artists (or YBAs) that emerged in the early 1990s, and has produced some of the most memorable, compelling and iconic works of the last fifteen years. Her autobiographical, confessional art has tapped into the mainstream of public consciousness, and has contributed to an unprecedented surge of interest in contemporary art in Britain. Emin studied at Maidstone College of Art, and the Royal College of Art in London, and has had major exhibitions around the world (including Amsterdam, New York, Sydney, Tokyo, Munich and Istanbul). She became a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2007, and in the same year, was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, the largest and most prestigious event in the art world calendar.  Highlights of the exhibition include My Bed, perhaps the artist’s most celebrated work (comprising her unmade bed, surrounded by the debris of her everyday life), which caused a sensation when it was shown at the Tate Gallery in 1999. Other large-scale installations, such as Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), The Perfect Place to Grow (2001) and It’s Not the Way I want to Die (2005) will also be reconstructed for the show. Famously, Emin’s art is intimately bound up in her own biography. Drawing directly upon her personal experiences, it often refers, with disarming and sometimes painful frankness, to traumatic episodes in her life, including her rape at the age of 13, her sexually promiscuous adolescence, and abortions. Emin’s great achievement is to have drawn upon her background – the sort of background that a lot of people share, but which is largely uncharted territory in the world of art – and to have done so in a manner that is neither tragic nor sentimental. Tracey Emin: 20 Years includes a dazzling array of the artist’s embroidered blankets, which she covers in bold, autobiographical texts. The earliest of these, Hotel International, dates from 1993 and was made for her first solo exhibition, where it was shown alongside a collection of letters, memorabilia, teenage diaries and photographs of paintings that she had destroyed. Tracey Emin: 20 Years features a number of other works from this remarkable show, which marked her out as a significant, and highly original talent. Emin’s family relationships are a central, recurring theme in her art, which the artist has explored in a variety of media. The exhibition features powerful examples, including a series of raw and deeply personal monoprints from 1994, entitled Family Suite; and There’s Alot of Money in Chairs (1994), a poignant and affectionate work made from an armchair given to Emin by her grandmother. On leaving the Royal College in 1989, Emin destroyed all of the paintings she had made there, and gave up painting altogether. It was not until 1996, when she staged the exhibition-cum-performance Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, in Stockholm, that she forced her way through her emotional blockage. Among the most recent works in Tracey Emin: 20 Years there is a selection of paintings made over the last two years, such as Cat Watching, (2006), and I Told you not to try and find me (2007), which reflect a more wistful and elegiac mood in her work. Organized by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Tracey Emin: 20 Years, will travel to the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (10 March - 21 June 2009).  Tracey Emin RA (born 3 July 1963) is an English artist of Turkish Cypriot origin, one of the group known as Britartists or YBAs (Young British Artists). Tracey Emin has succeeded in equalling, if not surpassing, Damien Hirst among the YBAs in terms of notoriety among the general public. A drunken outburst on a Channel 4 TV discussion, and My Bed — an installation in the 1999 Turner Prize exhibition, consisting of Tracey Emin's own unmade dirty bed with used condoms and blood-stained underwear — both caused a media furor.Tracey Emin's art takes many different forms of expression including needlework and sculpture, drawing, video and installation, photography and painting. There has been an ongoing dispute with former boyfriend, artist Billy Childish, particularly over the Stuckism movement. Tracey Emin is almost always portrayed as the victim in a modern tragedy. It’s rare to get a glimpse of the happy, successful, confident person she is now. I’ve Got It All is a classic afront to her critics as success, including the trappings are now firmly in Tracey Emin's grasp. In March 2007, Tracey Emin was chosen to join the Royal Academy of Arts in London as a Royal Academician. Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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