Tate Modern has announced the most extensive survey of Tracey Emin’s work to date. A Second Life will bring together more than 90 works spanning four decades, marking a defining moment in the artist’s career. Conceived with Emin herself, the exhibition charts a trajectory from her early, raw confessional works through to new large-scale paintings and bronzes made in the aftermath of cancer surgery.
Emin has built her practice around personal experience, often using her own body as the central medium. The exhibition moves from the urgency of her early installations and neons of the 1990s, through to the paintings of recent years that confront illness, survival and mortality with characteristic candour.
The opening rooms revisit Emin’s formative years, beginning with My Major Retrospective 1982–93, a suite of photographs documenting paintings she destroyed during a turbulent period, alongside Tracey Emin CV (1995) and the seminal video Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995). These works established the diaristic voice that has remained a constant in her practice.
Emin’s ties to Margate are threaded throughout the exhibition. Works such as Mad Tracey from Margate: Everybody’s Been There (1997) and It’s Not the Way I Want to Die (2005) confront both childhood memory and adult anxieties, linking her own story to the faded seaside landscape she continues to call home. More recent projects include the Tracey Emin Artist Residency, a free studio initiative she founded in Margate following her mother’s death and her own recovery from cancer.
The exhibition does not shy away from the most difficult chapters of Emin’s life. How It Feels (1996) offers a stark account of an abortion, while later works such as I Could Have Loved My Innocence (2007) and Is This a Joke (2009) articulate the enduring impact of trauma. Shown publicly for the first time, the quilt The Last of the Gold (2002) lays out an “A to Z of abortion.”
At the centre of the exhibition stand two installations that defined Emin’s emergence: Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), documenting her three-week performance in a Stockholm gallery, and the Turner Prize–nominated My Bed (1998), an unfiltered record of breakdown and recovery. Together they mark the passage from what Emin has described as her “first life” into the “second” that now frames her work.
Emin’s confrontation with cancer has given rise to some of her most direct works. The bronze Ascension (2024) reflects her altered relationship to her body post-surgery, while stills from a new documentary show the stoma she now lives with. This refusal to separate the personal from the public remains at the heart of her practice.
The exhibition culminates in expansive canvases that, while still shadowed by loss, move towards something more transcendent. Installed alongside the earlier Death Mask (2002) and the monumental bronze I Followed You Until the End (2023), these works insist on life lived in the present, even at its most precarious.
Speaking about the exhibition, Emin described it as “a benchmark… a moment in my life when I look back and go forward. A true celebration of living.”
Top Photo: © PC Robinson Artlyst 2025
Tracey Emin: A Second Life runs at Tate Modern from 26 February to 30 August 2026.