‘At the age of 13 I realised there was a danger in beauty and innocence – I could not have both,’ wrote Tracey Emin (born 1963) in her 1999 short story, Exploration of the Soul. Now these words, framed, hanging in the Tate Modern as part of her largest-ever exhibition, ‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life’, strike a prophetical tone.

Emin’s influence on contemporary art has been such as to redraw the landscape, yet her works challenge this aura that could have been in danger of eclipsing them. Finally, Emin speaks to us directly through 100 works united here, drawn from throughout her 40-year career. The show is epic in scale. Throughout the mix of media – there is painting, textiles, video, sculptures, neon and installation – Emin returns frequently to the incongruency she noted early on between beauty and innocence, with raw subjects translated into childlike symbols, delicate drawings and joyful colours, or scrawls in neon (‘I could have loved my innocence’).

Emin is ferocious in documenting her life, with a rawness and honesty, going back to her first abortion in 1990, an event she later referred to as an ‘emotional suicide’. It made her realise, she says, that her work before then was a ‘big bunch of crap’. She destroyed it all immediately. It is extraordinary to see, then, a recreation of this early work opening the show. Small photographs of her art-school paintings, framed on stitched fabric, offer a rare glimpse into an artist finding her way.

It’s moving and it’s tough to watch Emin processing her abortion. She is making sense of the jumble of conflicting emotions, as well as its everyday reality. In the 1996 film, How it feels, Emin documents how it feels to have an abortion – useful, she says, for women who are having one, then going into work the next morning, before the fact of it catches up with them. In the film, she stands in the street and discusses her own, turbulent experience. There’s the mundane – getting a cab, choosing what to wear – and the harrowing; the sickness and the fact that, horribly, it doesn’t go to plan.

Mediums are eclectic. Emin writes her CV on paper and documents her year on blankets (‘At the age of 13 why the hell should I trust anyone’ she appliqués in 1999). In 1994, she embroiders: ‘There’s a lot of money in chairs’ on the armchair she inherited from her great-grandmother, after her nan made the comment. Her nan meant that people stuffed money down the back of them.

In her blankets and armchairs, Emin questions the artistic integrity of quilt-making, imbuing the medium in her compositions with the gravity of paintings. The layered, textured quilts, with their bright colours and spontaneous thoughts, are the most joyful part of the show. Elsewhere, she looks beyond the expected for her next canvas; famously, it is on a bed where Emin documents her recovery from an alcohol-fuelled breakdown, with the Turner Prize-nominated My Bed, from 1998, closing the chapter of Emin’s ‘first life’.

Emin’s second life begins with her documenting cancer, surgery and disability. Seen for the first time here are new photographs of her stoma, following her major surgery for bladder cancer. Emin’s unflinching photographs of herself after her operation are vital works, an urgent dismissal of the coy and occasionally dangerous secrecy with which the body is handled. It's hard not to look away, but it's important you don't.

To follow these raw photographs with the series of beautiful, spiritual, large-scale paintings Emin created after her operation, as well as the monumental bronze outside, I Followed You Until The End, 2023, serves to anchor the exhibition, and Emin, in the present. Juxtapositions still reign, but in the gritty, bloody reality of living, Emin celebrates the beauty of being alive.

‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life’ at the Tate Modern, in partnership with Gucci, from 26 February – 30 August 2026, tate.org.uk

What is London art to you? Is it the haunted faces from Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach, ripped from a city at war? Or perhaps a punkish spirit reigns, in Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets and Slawn’s bold streaks of colour and Yinka Shonibare’s playful motif? Or perhaps it’s all of them, in which case Saatchi Yates’ celebration of London is calling your name.

Beginning in the aftermath of the Second World War, a new exhibition, ‘Once Upon a Time in London’, gathers established and emerging artists in an eclectic consideration of London’s impact on the cultural landscape. For gallery founders Arthur Yates and Phoebe Saatchi Yates, who upon opening the space in 2020 were told that London’s art scene had been overtaken by Paris and Milan, it feels like a defiant return to form.

Works from artists including David Hockney, George Rouy, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Michael Armitage, Jade Fadojutimi, Peter Doig, Chris Ofili and Bridget Riley trace Britain’s artistic movement from post-war, through recessions and pandemics, to Brexit and onwards. There’s a party spirit throughout, and a packed programme of events and collaborations; highlights include a catalogue overseen by Norman Foster, the launch of St John x Saatchi Yates’ wine, and a mischievous Nicky Haslam art-world tea towel.

Art on show is an eclectic mix, with a rethinking of traditional mediums key throughout. Contemporary moments, such as Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s enigmatic reworkings of figurative painting, join a classic rethinking of genre, seen in the subversive female figures in Jenny Saville’s graduation show. Seen together, the works are a triumphant love letter to London’s best bits. ‘As a gallery, we want to build a dialogue between the art world and the public,’ say the founders.

'Once Upon a Time in London' is at Saatchi Yates, 12 June - 17 August 2025, saatchiyates.com

‘I just started painting and painting and painting and painting,’ says Tracey Emin, who has spent the last few years exploring the medium in a series of works now exhibiting at White Cube Bermondsey in London. ‘I was quite angry about something – very angry, actually. I started writing over the paintings, and I never know what I'm going to write. It's just automatic. The words “I followed you to the end” came out. I was thinking about when you really believe in something or someone, and you will do anything for them, you will follow them to the complete end, and that's what I felt I'd done. And by following something or someone to the end, I realised it was the end, because I knew where the end was.’

The exhibition, taking its title from this moment of explicit awareness, traces Emin’s journey through loss. Teetering on the precipice of life and death, works consider the finality of emotion hand-in-hand with references to her recent personal exposure to the void. After a diagnosis of aggressive bladder cancer in 2020, Emin underwent major surgery that saw the removal of the affected, and surrounding, organs.

It is an ordeal that takes a visceral form in her works. In a video filmed by Emin, available to view in the exhibition, the pulsing red of her stoma becomes gushes of red spilling across her paintings. The body, reclining on the bed or in the bath, fades into the canvas when confronted by the often beautiful and tender pastels, in lavender and pretty pink gradients of blood.

‘When you have a stoma, sometimes it bleeds and sometimes this circle around the edge bleeds,’ says Emin. ‘But it's not a big deal. It's not a bad thing. It's fucking annoying, because it happens almost every day, and it can be a lot of blood, or no blood. This film is of my daily ritual, when I change my bag and see my stoma often bleeding, and it’s a bit like my bedroom [My Bed, 1998], in a way, I thought, oh, I hate this so much, but God no, it's actually quite beautiful. It's just the way you're looking at it, it’s how you perceive it. Because my stoma keeps me alive, this blood that is flowing is my blood, and that should be a positive thing. My blood is flowing. It's pulsing, it's breathing, it's alive.’

The volatile palette and raw dripping of the blood make an agonised foil for the softer tributes to a life, culminating in a tension between life and death. Among the wounds, the bleeding and the confrontations of mortality are autobiographical acknowledgments of support, such as Emin’s much-loved cats who silently keep watch in works big and small, pictured against her richly drawn domestic world. Ultimately, the paintings are love letters to the medium itself.

‘If all my work that I made before, everything – the sewing, the films, the photographs, the performances – if everything were a mountain, and I was climbing up the mountain, up the rock face, and then I get to the peak of the mountain and I get my flagpole and I stick it in, I attach my flag, and hoist my flag up as my flag blows in the wind. That is my painting. That is where my painting is, but it’s taken me all of that time to get up this rock face and all these different things to understand and appreciate that I had to get to the top of my mountain, not other people's mountains, mine, to understand what is really important to me, and it's painting.’

Tracey Emin, ‘I followed you to the end’ at White Cube Bermondsey, London, 19 September – 10 November 2024

whitecube.com

Studio Lenca’s paintings are a riot of effervescent pink, yellow, blue and red. Characters pose in sharp suits and giant-brimmed hats, surrounded by flowers or sweeping leaves. The artist (Jose Campos) emigrated on foot from El Salvador to the USA with his mother at the outbreak of the 1980s civil war, living undocumented and cleaning houses in the States through his childhood. He works under the name ‘Studio’ to reference the experimental space of his practice, and ‘Lenca’ to connect with the Mesoamerican indigenous people of eastern El Salvador.

His work now is a proud ode to his heritage, but it is felt inclusively. ‘Salvadoran people feel very connected to my work; they get it immediately,’ he tells me when we speak ahead of his new show ‘Leave to Remain’ opening at Carl Freedman Gallery in Margate (running until 16 June 2024). He is also a resident artist at Tracey Emin’s nearby TKE Studios. ‘But we have people from all over the world coming to visit. This kind of material speaks to different people. This very personal thing can also be about the human condition. Wanting to have a better life is universal.’

Studio Lenca worked with asylum seekers ahead of ‘Leave to Remain’ in Margate

For ‘Leave to Remain’, the artist has broken down the boundaries that keep many people out of commercial galleries. Ahead of the show, he has both visited and invited a group of young asylum seekers and refugees into the gallery for a series of workshops, in which they have created artwork while discussing ideas of difference, belonging and growth. They also shared food, visited local galleries, and had trips to the beach. The group is led by Kent Refugee Action Network (KRAN), whose young people learn English through creative means. ‘We don’t all share a common language,’ the artist says. ‘It’s the doing and the materials that connect us. Materials are borderless. Pushing paint on a surface feels amazing wherever you are.’

In one group, he invited attendees to explore the idea of roots in relation to both plants and the routes of a journey. In another, they considered volcanos (which famously make up El Salvador’s landscape) metaphorically, as the explosive potential that exists within everyone, promising new growth after traumatic upheaval. The resulting three giant papier-mâché volcanos painted by the group are shown in the exhibition, with cross-section diagrams drawn in pencil on the walls. 

‘When I go in, I feel the movement of their bodies,’ the artist says. ‘Volcanos form landscapes. Lava creates the most fertile ground for growth. Being from El Salvador, volcanos have always been part of my connection to the Earth. I wanted to work with KRAN because of our shared experience of displacement. When these young people cross borders, they bring their knowledge, histories, and experiences. They are full of potential and possibility.’ The audience are invited to move the volcano sculptures around the exhibition: ‘Collectively we have to pull these forms in the space and shape it together.’

This collaboration has drawn on Studio Lenca’s childhood experiences – he tells me how vital free art and dance classes were – and his previous career as a schoolteacher in Peckham, London. The artist’s own work features in the gallery’s other two rooms, with volcano paintings; a series of pieces connected with El Salvador’s folkloric dancers; and images of angels, which explore ideas of faith. 

Studio Lenca’s work delicately holds together painful realities and hope. There is a resounding feeling of jubilation; a mood that was present for moments of his gallery workshops, as teenagers gleefully drew directly upon freshly white-painted walls. ‘There is definitely a lot of joy,’ he considers. ‘My practice is a form of healing. I always talk about having to hide, having grown up with this huge secret that you might get caught and have to leave the country. I’m trying to subvert that by shouting about it now and making the most bright, beautiful things that I can.’

'Leave to Remain' is at Carl Freedman gallery, Margate, until 16 June 2024

carlfreedman.com

Textiles have often been saddled with restrictive definitions around craft and gender stereotypes, when in fact, they have formed some of the most radical and progressive works of the last century. Many artists have played with these definitions, creating subversive feminist works and expansive sculptural forms. ‘Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art’, a show of 50 intergenerational artists at the Barbican Centre in London, explores quite how far the medium has evolved in the last sixty years. 

“It’s a really capacious, expansive view of what textiles are,” says assistant curator Diego Chocano. “I hope viewers are surprised about what we are considering to be textile practice, because a lot of the artists are trying to push those boundaries and expand.” The works address issues of violence and colonialism, as well as ideas around love, hope and resistance. The show brings together long-established and emerging names from around the world, including Faith Ringgold, Cecilia Vicuña, Billie Zangewa, Louise Bourgeois, Ghada Amer and Tracey Emin.

The 1960s is a key starting point, when many artists were experimenting with the political power of textiles in line with second wave feminism, the ongoing civil rights movement, protests against the Vietnam war, and the hippie subculture. “Although we’re not talking specifically about the hippie movement in the show, I do think that influenced a lot of the artists,” says Chocano. “Using tapestry to protest was a big thing in the 1960s. This is something Violeta Parra was doing. She was very aware of what was happening in the US and was also inspired by Latin America’s rich history of using textiles. The 1960s was a moment when textiles as an art movement was coming off the walls and becoming three-dimensional.”

The power of textiles not only to protest but also to protect is an unexpected angle in the exhibition. Throughout history, fabric has been used to wrap both new-born babies and dead bodies, offering warmth and comfort, respect and shielding. In his lifetime, Feliciano Centurión worked with blankets found in markets, which he would write poetic refrains onto. These pieces embodied ideas of shelter and refuge, at a time in which the artist was dying from AIDs-related complications. Chocano tells me that the act of sewing in this part of the artist’s life was healing in itself. For many included in the show, the slow and methodical process of stitching is an act of self-care.

There is a section also exploring the idea of wounds and repair, where the stitch might be used to bring together pieces of fabric or parts of flesh. These ideas are expanded out in some works to explore the idea of repairing communities and countries. Chocano highlights the work of Angela Su, who addresses the divides between Hong Kong and mainland China, with stitching and repair as a metaphor for scarring. “We look not just at this beautiful, romanticised version of it, but also how to repair and stitch means puncturing a hole, piercing,” he says. “To repair or mend can actually be a very painful thing.”

Of course, for many contemporary artists, the ethics of fabric production within the context of environmental collapse is an important one. In many cases, the medium is the message, with artists choosing sustainable, traditional methods to work with. Their processes often go against the neo-liberal idea of producing in the quickest way possible. Yee I-Lann, for example, works with a community of weavers in Borneo, creating woven mats that would have been used in pre-colonial times to eat and sleep on. 

While the exhibition highlights the recent history of textiles in art, Chocano has one eye on the future, recognising that the medium is only going to keep expanding. “We are beginning to see how much textile work is in museum programming now,” he says. “At Frieze London last year, there was so much textile work. That’s not to say it still doesn’t carry this baggage. Less and less so, but there is still this idea that it’s women’s work. A lot of what we’re trying to do is look at how artists have harnessed this baggage for their own subversive ends.”

'Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art’ at the Barbican Centre is on until 26 May

barbican.org.uk

Melbourne’s third NGV Triennial has opened, a snapshot of new and recent art, design and architecture from around the world as seen through the work of over 120 artists, designers and collectives. Loosely curated across three themes – Magic, Matter and Memory – NGV Triennial is a vast art experience that reads as a collective curatorial statement on contemporary interests.

Inside Melbourne NGV Triennial 2023

Visitors are greeted before they enter the building by a number of public artworks including a billboard by Yoko Ono declaring ‘I LOVE YOU EARTH’, David Shrigley’s phallic thumbs-up sculpture and, installed in the moat outside NGV, a monumental bronze eel trap by Wurundjeri artist Aunty Kim Wandin that references the craft and connections to land and water of local First Peoples.

Inside, NGV’s curatorial team have installed a vast and eclectic collection of recent acquisitions, new commissions and artworks that speak to the times we are living in. In the foyer, two large-scale sculptures by Thomas J Price highlight and seek to help correct the inadequate and prejudiced representations of Black people in art and the media. 

Some artists have their work installed in standalone galleries – such as the standout installation Mun-dirra, a monumental 100m-long woven fish fence which took 13 women artists from the Burarra language group working with three apprentices two years to create. A room by Elmgreen & Dragset brings together four works from across their practice, including What’s left, fig. 2, where a realistic sculpture of a man hangs singlehandedly from a tightrope, and The Balcony, where a metallic figure leans over the balcony, apparently photographing visitors. 

Elsewhere, works are interspersed in NGV’s permanent collections of art, design and fashion. Works by Tracey Emin include a 5m-high text-based neon light installation, while Agnieszka Pilat presents AI-enabled robot dogs that have been trained to paint.

Visitors that make it into NGV’s garden will find Nic Brunsdon’s experimental architectural commission (This is) Air that changes shape throughout the day as it expands and releases air, to draw attention to the universal act of breathing. It is hard to take in NGV Triennial in one visit, partly due to the expansive nature of the exhibition and partly due to the huge crowds it attracts.

3 December 2023 – 7 April 2024 at NGV International, Melbourne, ngv.vic.gov.au

Is Damien Hirst the most famous British artist of our time? He might be. You might have seen his Tate retrospective in 2012, or End of a Century at his own Newport Street Gallery in 2021, but given Hirst’s fame and reach, retrospective or survey shows are relatively rare. Given his prolific output, it can be easy to forget to look back at his early work. 

Emerging from the late 80s, a time marked politically by greed and a wide gap between the rich and poor in the UK, was what became the Young British Artist movement, in part born out of the iconic 1988 ‘Freeze’ exhibition. Hirst has always been concerned with both death and fear, and these themes run through his art. They manifest as a focus on pharma, self-destruction, anxiety and decay, with a side of mass artistic production and - most recently - the accessibility of projects like The Currency, which saw Hirst make, sell and destroy a huge number of works which were sold at a much lower price point than the artists’ other works.

The Weight of Things, at The Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art, Munich (MUCA), was curated by Hirst himself and comprises work spanning four decades. Casting back to the early 1990’s, the UK was in recession and coming to the fore was a generation of British artists, gallerists and curators who would alter the art scene in the UK forever and birth a scene which has sent ripples around the world. Hirst, with Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin, shocked with his work through its directness in addressing the unsayable and the fear that surrounds our relationship with death. These days key contemporaries of Hirst, and the artist himself, headline shows at the world’s most prestigious museums and events. 

‘When Logics Die’, 1991, which features a photograph of a suicide alongside a table set with medical grade implements and cleaning products, is still a very shocking work and one rarely discussed when speaking about Hirst’s work. You could say he has gradually mellowed over subsequent decades of his career as his focus moved from the actuality of death to the nihilism of smoking in ‘Forgotten Dead’, 1997 a supersize ashtray filled with real, smoked cigarette butts.

There are many works from the ‘Natural History’ series, including perhaps his most famous, where Hirst placed dead animals into clear tanks of formaldehyde. The shock factor of these works just doesn’t fade as, no matter your feelings on them, they force us to confront our own mortality. These works, as with most of the work Hirst makes, goes to the heart of things. There really is nothing like them.

Alongside a series of impossibly named spin paintings, including ‘School - The Excellence of Every Art Must Consist in the Complete Accomplishment of its Purpose’, 2006, we see lesser-known works, selected and positioned by Hirst. The juxtaposition of the horror-laced dark humour of ‘Jeepster’, 1993 a recreation of a severed cow's head and Fear of Death (Full Skull), 2007, a human skull covered in dead flies, with spot painting ‘Pargyline’, 2005 – a hypertension medication – and the iconic ‘Nothing Matters’, 1997 a cabinet filled with medicine is dizzying. There is an inescapable bleakness Hirst’s early works and, despite ourselves, a humour. 

There is a shift around the time of ‘For the Love of God’ made in 2007, a human skull paved with diamonds, with one huge stone at the pineal eye which we see, alone in a wartime bunker, adjacent to the museum, while we also see work exploring the darker side of humanity such as ‘The Fragility of Love’, 2000, in which a beach ball hovers above a sea of knives. Hirst has selected butterfly works and several pieces from his smash hit Venice show of 2017, ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’, including perhaps his most direct confronting of his own death: a self-portrait in sculpture, ‘Bust of the Collector’, 2016, in which we see a Roman-esque bust of Hirst covered with coral. 

There is something unflinching about Damien Hirst, and this is what we see in this show. He may have mellowed over the years, but his desire to push the boundaries, whether through large numbers of prints distributed through HENI, or burning 1,000 works of art in his project The Currency, show he is hell bent on going against the grain. 

The Weight of Things is on at the Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art (MUCA), Munich, from 26 October 2023 until end of January 2024 

muca.eu

Frieze London 2023 – bigger, better, longer than any Frieze before – sees the world’s cultural magpies descend on the city. As Frieze marks its 20th anniversary, it’s a big moment for the world’s most famous art fair, and one it is celebrating with a packed programme of events, spanning the established – El Anatsui, Frans Hals and Ai Weiwei lead the heavyweights at Frieze Masters – to the eclectic, such as Sprüth Magers’ presentation of a Hyun-Sook Song retrospective and White Cube’s Mona Hatoum exhibition. More than 160 galleries from 46 countries will come together from 11 – 15 October. 

The action extends far beyond the perimeters of the fair’s epicentre in Regent’s Park. Saatchi Yates art cabaret with Will St John at The Box; Berlin-based and Jamaican-born multimedia artist MJ Harper’s one-off performance at London’s Koko; and Avery Singer’s show at Hauser & Wirth coinciding with Frieze’s opening are just some of our Frieze Week highlights.

Frieze London 2023: what to see in the fair

Frieze Masters presents works from the last few centuries in a generous curation. Galleria Continua will focus on the years 1983 to 1999 in a presentation of Ai Weiwei’s works including his famous Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn and June, 1994. El Anatsui, whose 2023 Hyundai commission is concurrently opening at the Tate Turbine Hall, will showcase a 30-year career with a solo booth at Jack Shainman, while D’Lan Contemporary’s showing of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s paintings marks the first appearance of an Australian First Nations artist at Frieze Masters. Also not to be missed is Nigeria’s most important modernist, Ben Enwonwu, at Kó Gallery from Lagos.

Leading galleries are presenting a selection of group, solo and thematic shows. Look out for Sadie Coles HQ, which nods to the fair’s first edition in 2003 with works by artists who took part, including  John Currin and Sarah Lucas. Also feeling nostalgic is Pilar Corrias, whose solo exhibition by Margate-based artist Sophie Von Hellerman is inspired by Margate’s Dreamland. Immersive works, such as Julianknxx’s video presented by Edel Assanti, which coincides with his Barbican Curve commission, join bronze sculptures by Barbara Chase-Riboud at Hauser & Wirth. 

For Lisson Gallery, US-born artist Van Hanos is the focus, with paintings that draw from time spent in Vienna, while Pace Gallery is giving us a taster of 2024, with works by Paulina Olowska, Mao Yan, Yto Barrada, Kiki Kogelnik, and Robert Longo. At Nicola Vassell, a presentation of new paintings by Deborah Anzinger will examine the ways the artist works with ground cookshop charcoal, a fuel indigenous to her native Jamaica. In the Breguet booth, ‘Resisting Time’, curated by independent curator Somi Sim, will look at the concept of time through artists including Hanne Darboven and Julien Coignet. Marianne Boesky Gallery will showcase Danielle Mckinney’s first U.K. solo presentation, shining a light on her paintings of female figures, caught in moments of leisure.

To celebrate Frieze London’s 20 years, eight established artists have been invited to propose a solo exhibition from an emerging artist. For Tracey Emin, Margate-based Vanessa Raw’s paintings are a natural choice; for Olafur Eliasson, it is Fabian Knecht and his installation of pieces of clothing used as camouflage to protect Russian targets in Ukraine. Anthea Hamilton champions Carlos Villa’s 1980s body-print series, Wolfgang Tillmans’ new sculptures and silver gelatin prints by Mark Barker. Meanwhile, the Modern Institute is showcasing the work of artists Rachel Eulena Williams, Jim Lambie and Andrew Sim and more

Elsewhere, talks not to miss include Thomas J Price in conversation with Gus Casely-Hayford (director, V&A East), Arlene Shechet in conversation with Sheena Wagstaff, and Rachel Whiteread with art historian Briony Fer. Towards the end of the week, catch Maggi Hambling, Sarah Lucas and Louisa Buck and Mandy El Sayegh, Flavia Frigeri and Valerie Cassel Olive.

Frieze London 2023: what to see outside the fair

There’s a packed programme of shows, performances and talks taking place around London during Frieze. 

Listen: Art for Thought Coffee Cocktail evening 

Illycaffè’s collaboration with arts club The Cultivist is a fruitful one. A series of evening talks at the Michelin-starred Apricity will see experts lead the way on arts-based topics. Joey Lico, executive director of The Cultivist (and former director at the New York Foundation for the Arts and art advisor to the White House under the Obama administration) will advise ‘How to Build an Art House’ on 9 October, while curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum East, Dr Madeline Haddon, will discuss ‘Art Through the Ages’ on 23 October. Guests can relax, learn and sip on their coffee cocktails. 

Tickets available @ £40 per person from Eventbrite.co.uk

Listen: Ruinart x Talkart podcast at Serpentine Pavilion

Maison Ruinart and Serpentine have teamed up to explore the possibilities in contemporary art. This live TalkArt podcast recording, the first in a series, will see contemporary artist Eva Jospin and Talk Art Podcast hosts Russell Tovey and Robert Diament discuss Jospin’s inspirations behind Ruinart Carte Blanche Commission, Promenade(s).

Tickets available from Eventbrite.co.uk

See: Saatchi Yates

Catch Brooklyn-based artist Will St John chatting to journalist and photographer Marc C O’Flaherty on 9 October. See St John’s work while you are there, on show until 22 October.

saatchiyates.com/

Do: Minor Attractions

Don’t miss this ‘non-fair’ of performance, music and nightlife, held across two weeks at two different London sites. 

minorattractions.com/Minor-Attractions

154 Contemporary African Art Fair

Held for the 11th year at Somerset House, this year’s exhibition will host over 60 international exhibitors, making it the largest show to date. 

1-54.com/london

See Saatchi Yates and Will St. John kick off Frieze Week with an exhibition and cabaret

Saatchi Yates is marking the beginning of Frieze London 2023 with a celebration of its three year anniversary. To commemorate the the occasion, the space will host an exhibition with artist Will St. John, who created classically influenced portraits of New York’s drag queens and trans community through painting and sculpture. The gallery will be hosting a talk at 6:30 on Monday 9 th October which is open to the public and his eponymous exhibition itself will be running until 22nd October.

wallpaper.com

Don't miss: Nanomuseum, a limited-edition collaboration between French jewelry house Dauphin and Serpentine Galleries, at Dover Street Market

Charlotte Dauphin and Hans Ulrich Obrist have worked together to create a series of pieces inspired by works of art.  

london.doverstreetmarket.com

Visit: Kaws' takeover of London’s Shreeji News

Gabriel Chipperfield, who transformed the newsagent’s in 2020, creating a salon and reading room and space for events and exhibitions, as well as a wide selection of magazines, let Kaws lead the way when it came to his residency

wallpaper.com

Visit: Avant Arte at Matches

Avant Arte is taking over Matches townhouse at 5 Carlos Place, London, during Frieze, with the installation on display until 4 November. 

avantarte.com

Fall down the rabbit hole into Charlotte Colbert’s Frieze Week dreamland

‘Dreamland Sirens’, a London exhibition from Charlotte Colbert, is curated by Simon de Pury and LA-based gallery UTA Artist Space

wallpaper.com

Don't miss: MJ Harper’s performance piece at London’s Koko 

Artist MJ Harper will premiere ‘Arias for a New World’ at Koko in London this Sunday, 15 October 2023

wallpaper.com

See: Bronx-Based Artist Kenny Rivero's UK debut

The artist's first exhibition outside of the US and Mexico unites his paintings and drawings at Charles Moffett, No. 9 Cork Street, from 5 - 21 October.

https://charlesmoffett.com/artists/13-kenny-rivero/

See:  Yinka Ilori's piece created for member's club George for Frieze London

Yinka Ilori draws on his Nigerian heritage for the piece on show at George Club throughout Frieze. 

georgeclub.com

Above the Harbour Arm in Margate, a pink neon sign reads, I Never Stopped Loving You. The 2010 signature piece by Tracey Emin is an apt declaration to the town where she grew up. While living in London for over three decades, Emin’s connection to Margate was never far, punctuating her work throughout her career. She eventually moved back to the coastal settlement in 2016 and today is a champion of its renaissance. ‘I’ve come back to Margate as a different person, and I’ve come back to a different Margate. So it’s like, we are both in tandem, in tune with each other,’ she said as we tour her new artist’s studio complex, a 10-minute walk from her neon installation.

The pioneering complex, named TKE Studios for her allonym Taki Karima Emin, is located in the former Edwardian bathhouse a short walk from her home and atelier. Within it is a network of 12 professional artist studios, exhibition space, a folly which will turn into a mini conservatory, reception, and speciality bookshop. Ample amounts of natural light find their way into each of the generously sized studios, with sunlight flooding the main exhibition space through the vaulted skylights. Major utilities are already provided, with some studios being additionally subsidised by Emin herself. ‘Most artists in big cities have been chased out by developers,’ she says. ‘Margate and Thanet are totally welcoming artists. They want artists here. They want creative energy.’

On the ground floor, with a separate entrance through the future sculpture garden, Emin is set to open the Tracey Emin Artist Residency in January 2023. Organised with photographer Elissa Cray, every two-year residency will foster up to 20 aspiring and early-career artists committed to furthering their creative discipline. The guest lecturers programme includes art critics Matthew Collings, Jonathan Jones, Jerry Saltz, artists Jake Chapman, David Dawson, Kenny Schachter, and Vivienne Westwood. Emin hopes to create a stirring environment for the artists, emphasising a rigorous exhibition cycle and intergenerational dialogue through spirited debate and critique. ‘Everyone I’ve spoken to is keen to do it because we all know that the educational system is extremely difficult at the moment,’ she explains. ‘How I got through then, with every grant under the sun and every scholarship I could get, was difficult enough. There is no way I could possibly ever do it today. If I hadn’t made art, I would be dead by now. So everything I’m paying back into society would’ve been lost. When I was ill, I thought I was going to die. A part of me asked, what’s it all about? What am I here for? What am I doing? I knew I could do so much more, but I wasn’t sure what it was. And then the whole thing made perfect sense. If we can get one person here that becomes a really good, amazing artist, I’ve done my job.’

To help fund this dream initiative, Christie’s presents the artist’s highly personal painting, Like A Cloud of Blood (2022). The artwork will be exhibited in London from 6-13 October, head of Christie’s 20th Century & 21st Century: Evening Sale on 13 October at a handsome estimate of £500,000-700,000. The painting is one of the first pieces Emin created after recovering from bladder cancer in 2020. ‘I hadn’t painted properly for so long. All my muscles just got eaten away when I was ill.’ Emin says. ‘[In recovery] I started swimming and everything got stronger. When I started painting again, I couldn’t believe it. I was so excited. All my colours were different. Everything was different.’ The painting features Emin’s iconic figurative study of her body under an abstract pink Margate sky. ‘It’s about love and feeling love; it’s about desire. Even with cancer, still feeling those emotions and passion and feeling all those things.’

Emin’s work has never shied away from the visceral and deep-seated emotions of the human condition. Be it fifty double-hung insomniac self-portraits, dripping canvases of bereavement, an 18-tonne bronze sculpture honouring her mother or a simple and sweetly handwritten love poem to Margate, her oeuvre traces a complex and tumultuous existence. One that compels and captivates. ‘Throughout her career, Tracey Emin has invited viewers to share in the most intimate aspects of her life,’ said Katharine Arnold, head of post-war and contemporary art, Christie’s Europe. ‘With extraordinary candour and a vivid vision, in Like a Cloud of Blood she lets us into her world following her cancer diagnosis. The searing honesty we are accustomed to in her oeuvre resonates with her audience even more so in this painting.’ The studio complex has already been purchased outright, so all the additional funding from the sale of the piece will go towards developing new artists through the residency and reinvesting into TKE Studios for the future. 

Emin says, ‘I don’t want to die being an artist that made really interesting work. I want to make a future. If my art can make something happen for the future, then I’m doing the right thing. I’ve been all the way around the world in all directions and come back again. And this, Margate, is what I’ve chosen.’

INFORMATION

Like A Cloud of Blood by Tracey Emin will be exhibited at Christie’s London from 6-13 October, and included in the 20th Century & 21st Century: Evening Sale on 13 October. christies.com

Left, Reka Nyari, Pussy, signed and numbered 1/7, chromatic print on silver paper. Executed in 2012, this work is number 1 from an edition of 7. Provenance: the artist. Right, Penny Slinger, Homage to Lawrence Durrell, painted wax life cast, in 2 parts. Executed in 1973. Provenance: the artist

A playful and provocative look at female sexuality is the focus of a Sotheby’s selling exhibition. ‘A Woman’s Right to Pleasure’, created in collaboration with BlackBook and inspired by the tome of the same name, traces female experience over the last century in a reframing of traditional narratives.

Sexuality is viewed through the lens of female artists, with works from the likes of Nan Goldin, Penny Slinger, Reka Nyari, Tracey Emin, Judy Chicago, Jenny Holzer, Marilyn Minter, Betty Tompkins, Alexandra Rubinstein and Louise Bourgeois presenting women’s sexuality through a plethora of mediums. Artworks, encompassing prints, photography, oil paintings and neon, riff on both traditional and contemporary multimedia.

Pieces consider both classical motifs and cheeky double entendres, from Reka Nyari’s Pussy print, which intertwines the linguistic and the sexual, to Penny Slinger’s rethinking of everyday motifs. With a slight shift in perspective, domestic objects – long symbols of women’s repression – become markers for female pleasure.

Judy Chicago celebrates the tactility of unexpected materials with Submerged/Emerged #1, which draws sensual silhouettes in acrylic spray on pressed and moulded cast paper, while Sophia Wallace’s Άδάμας (Unconquerable) is a sculptural celebration of femininity in wood, fibreglass, steel and enamel.

Jewellery is also included, with Indian brand Studio Renn presenting six pieces from the ‘Seed-Leaf’ collection, which will debut at the exhibition, representing the cyclical nature of fertility and abundance in gold and precious stones.

The book that lends its name to the exhibition was released in 2020, and featured artists’ works alongside essays from Erica Jong and Roxane Gay. There is photography by both established and emerging names, including Cindy Sherman, Marilyn Minter, Carrie Mae Weems, Harley Weir, Mickalene Thomas and Martine Gutierrez, while written contributions from Erika Lust, Stoya, Alice Little, Vaginal Davis, Naana Otoo-Oyortey, Dani Lessnau, Natasha Stagg and Pussy Riot's Nadya Tolokonnikova muse on the links between pleasure and empowerment.

Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City. Signed, titled, dated and numbered AP4 in ink on an accompanying label cibachrome print, flush-mounted. Executed in 1983. Provenance: the artist

Louise Bourgeois, House Struck By a Lightning Bolt. Signed with the artist’s initials; titled and variously inscribed on the reverse. Ink, graphite, whiteout and gouache on paper. Executed in 1998. Provenace: acquired by the present owner at Wright Auction, Chicago, April 27, 2010

INFORMATION

‘BlackBook Presents: A Woman’s Right to Pleasure’, 8 July – 12 August, Sotheby’s LA

sothebys.com

‘Our lives are in a trilogy. I’m in my last bit, so I’ve got to try and get it right,’ Tracey Emin reflects on the eve of her new solo exhibition, which has just opened at London’s White Cube Bermondsey. What’s the overriding theme of the exhibition? Herself. Because after all, Emin is what Emin does best.

In the 1980s, she emerged as the fresh faced enfant terrible of the Young British Artists movement. Four decades later and she’s still charged with the same acerbic bite – an unflinching exhibitionist who manages to exhibit both her self and work in a single space. Much to the relief of her admirers and critics, Emin has emerged from her sabbatical no less explosive albeit older, wiser and less of a ‘party girl’. The passion with which she visually and verbally dissects everything from ‘hideous’ Brexit to abortion, rape, relationships and her mother’s death is itself sobering to witness.

But the captivating candidness and apparent self-annihilation that earned her public notoriety in youth are not moments she reflects on fondly. ‘I suddenly woke up one morning and realised that I’d really fucked myself over by talking too much... by giving too much away,’ she recalls. But here, within the walls of White Cube it feels as though Emin is entirely in control of her work and self-image – as she puts it, ‘getting her act together’. ‘What this whole show is about is releasing myself from shame. I’ve killed my shame, I’ve hung it on the walls,’ she explains.

Sprawling over 5,440 sq m of White Cube, the artist’s first London show in half a decade feels like a homecoming – a culmination of new and historical painting, photography, film, large-scale sculpture and neon text, of course, the 21st-century answer to Dada’s Readymade. The idea for the exhibition title, ‘A Fortnight of Tears’, long preceded the majority of this work’s creation. She’s had this one in the bank for 15 years, tentatively awaiting the right time to deploy it. ‘It’s the longest I’ve ever cried for I think, a fortnight,’ she says.

Themes in the exhibition stem directly from the artist’s own emotions: the loss of her parents and her ‘self-respect’, the female experience, spiritualism and sexuality. Three monumental bronze sculptures – including one portraying her mother in her eighties – are the largest Emin has produced to date. These sit adjacent to new a photographic series Insomnia (a four-year work in progress) alongside a vast quantity of paintings, studies and artefacts including a Ouija board. An early video work How It Feels (1996), chronicling Emin after her harrowing 1990 abortion, is shown in tandem with The Ashes, a new film work shot in the artist’s east London home. The camera pans over a scene in Emin’s light-drenched dining room where her mother’s ashes sit in a wooden box.

In the first gallery, visitors are reacquainted with the artist’s infamous bed – but this time it’s Emin in bed, 50 times over in a grid of self-portraits on the gallery’s walls. This format is nothing fundamentally new: Emin has been performing the selfie before the selfie was even born. In these portraits, viewers become intimately acquainted with Emin’s surgery scars, facial lacerations and cyclical changes in mood and nightwear.

Some are humorous, some are haunting and one was taken the night she knew her mother had died. This is the ongoing Insomnia series, which sees Emin alone, tormented by fatigue but incapable of sleep. ‘I had it [insomnia] in my early twenties in art school, but I loved it then, I could do whatever I wanted and it seemed that I had more hours in the day. As I’ve got older it’s got more and more soul destroying. Insomnia is not an affectation, it’s crippling,’ she says.

But it’s Emin’s paintings that steal the show, both in their immense quantity and volatile passion. They Held Me Down While He Fucked Me 1976 and But You Never Wanted me (both 2018) are two of the many portraits depicting gestural female nudes – presumably Emin – reclining, sleeping, bleeding and masturbating. The paint seeps in visceral layers riddled with trauma, rage, rejection and sexual aggression – Schiele-esque in twisted, gritty composition and Munch-like in eerie dilution.

With its acute commentary on the extremities of the female experience, it’s difficult to avoid drawing parallels with the today’s #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. ‘I kept trying to say [this] to people years ago’, Emin exclaims. ‘Suddenly I’m allowed to express myself and to have the language and the voice that I’ve had for years and years. Now we’re in a time where we can put things right, and this is what my work is about.’

So once again, we’re voyeurs in the next phase of this turbulent artistic existence, no less gripped, but perhaps now a little more empathetic. The White Cube show feels far beyond raw personal confession and seems to assert the precision and complexities of the broader human experience. ‘I don’t have anything else in my life,’ she says, ‘my work has completely taken over now and I’m completely dedicated to it.’

INFORMATION

‘A Fortnight of Tears’ is on view from 6 February – 7 April. For more information, visit the White Cube website

ADDRESS

White Cube Bermondsey
144-152 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3TQ

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Per Kirkeby’s Brick Labyrinth has cropped up at Château la Coste, joining its extensive collection of works by Tadao Ando, Jean Nouvel, Richard Serra, Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois. Hidden in the depths of the splendid property situated a stone’s throw from Aix-en-Provence, among oaks and vineyards (the Domaine is as well known for its wine as it is for its art), this is the Danish-born artist’s very last completed sculpture: he died in May this year, shortly before his installation was complete.

Kirkeby first visited Château La Coste in 2006, as part of a trip to Paul Cézanne’s homeland in the south of France, and immediately started laying the foundations for a project at the property, which would include a temporary exhibition as well as this permanent sculpture. With Brick Labyrinth, he took inspiration from European romanticism, turning the labyrinth into a tower with two basic interior spaces.

References to Donald Judd’s minimalism and to Mayan art and architecture are nonetheless evident – Kirkeby conceived his first brick sculpture in 1973 after traveling to Central America – as is a little homage to Provence through his choice of slender, bright red, archetypically Mediterranean bricks.

Original sketches and notes for Brick Labyrinth are visible to visitors of the Domaine at the entrance of ‘Matter is Light’, the temporary exhibition curated by the Château La Coste team and Kirkeby’s longtime gallerist, Michael Werner. In a pristine space occupying an old winery, next to Ando’s Centre d’Art, a selection of rarely-shown paintings dating between 2008 and 2014 is accompanied by sculptures from the 1980s. Not geometrical brick ones this time, but rather organically-shaped bronze pieces which, at some angles, appear to reveal human or animal profiles.

Kirkeby’s obsession with geology (dating back to his early years as a young geology graduate working between the Danish mainland and Greenland) is visible in almost every piece, from the sculptures mimicking the stratified volcanic rocks of the north to the large-scale paintings, featuring his trademark bright pops of colour in the midst of rich, woodland-inspired shades.

‘People think I’m a colourist, but I have tried to refute the idea that colours are pretty for years. Actually, it’s quite the opposite: they mean something, they have a property. One which is often difficult to make out,’ said the artist in a 2014 interview discussing gravity and grace, before adding: ‘beauty is not enough. There must be something more, a structure. You must commit yourself, and risk everything, sacrifice the good, and go through a process of recognition until something better is created, built upon the ruins of the original idea.’

INFORMATION

‘Per Kirkeby: Matter is Light’ is on view until 21 January 2019. For more information, visit the Château La Coste website and the Michael Werner Gallery website

ADDRESS

Château La Coste
2750 Route De La Cride
13610 Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade

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‘I could lose my heart to art,’ says Anya Hindmarch at Sotheby's, where she has curated an edit of ten pieces of contemporary art as part of its Contemporary Curated sale, which coincides with London Fashion Week. ‘My husband laughs at me because he thinks that one day I'll come home with a piece of art that I've remortgaged the house to get.’

Among Hindmarch's selection are pieces by Keith Haring, a neon pink and a black painting that she says she loves for its ‘energy and joy’, a photograph by Thomas Ruff, a large-scale light sculpture by Olafur Eliasson, and other paintings by Tracey Emin, Sam Francis and Anish Kapoor, among others.

‘It was really hard to choose the works. A few of the paintings I really reacted to, and really want on my [own] walls,’ she says. ‘Like the Haring, which I still want desperately, but others, like the Richter, which is a small photograph smeared with paint really grows and grows on you – it's small but so captivating. The Kapoor, with its two white spots, moves and morphs the longer you look at it.’

Hindmarch, who is a trustee of the Royal Academy and the Design Museum, describes herself as a ‘timid’ and ‘small-scale’ collector of art. ‘We operate a one-in-one-out policy at home. I have too many children to feed, house and educate to buy much more,’ she jokes. ‘And then there's a lack of wall space…’

Hindmarch said that she chose the works based on what she'd like to live with. ‘They are just pieces that I loved, that I'd want to have around me; I wasn't trying to think about how they would hang together,’ she says. ‘But, actually, they do work well as a group.’

Sotheby's head of Contemporary Curated London, Joanna Steingold, said the auction house had wanted to invite an inspirational female British tastemaker. Hindmarch, with her patronage and love of art was the perfect candidate. Steingold presented Hindmarch with a short list of about 30 pieces to make the final curated edit of ten.

‘The variety of styles that Anya chose was surprising,’ says Steingold. ‘With the playful mood of her collections, so bright and poppy, I expected her to choose more poppy pieces of art, but pieces like those by Wolfgang Tillmans and Ai Weiwei are very thoughtful and invite you to look twice to discover them.’

The designer said that there was a strong chance that she might walk away for the auction on Tuesday with one of the artworks, which would potentially join her own collection at home.

‘My favourite piece at home is a work by Chris Levine of The Queen with her eyes shut,’ she says. ‘It's hung in the drawing room and my kids are absolutely terrified of it; they're scared that at any moment she could open her eyes.’

Hindmarch's curated edit is the second time Sotheby's has invited a designer to guest curate for the auction. In March, fellow London-based designer Erdem Moralioglu also curated an edit for the Contemporary Curated series, which was first launched in the United States in 2013, and has since featured auctions guest-curated by American author and art collector James Frey, Tamara Mellon, Anna Sui and NFL player Keith Rivers.

But Steingold says that the next edition of the sale will probably see Sotheby's veer away from fashion designers. ‘We want to continue connecting and collaborating with leading tastemakers, and there's a lot of people on my wish list for a potential future guest curator,’ she explains, declining to name her targets, but suggesting that music or architecture could be fields from which they are drawn.

INFORMATION
For more information visit the Sotheby’s website

The pre-sale exhibition is open until Monday 19th September, with the auction scheduled for 10.30am on Tuesday 20th September

'Neon: The Charged Line', opens this weekend at Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool – and is well worth a trip up north. 

Blackpool, with its circling gulls, forgotten chippies and dangerously cheap beer, is not the first place you'd expect to find a Joseph Kosuth masterpiece nestled next to an iconic Tracey Emin. This juxtaposition of the great and the gaudy is precisely the joy of 'Neon: The Charged Line', which opens this weekend at Grundy Art Gallery.

Coinciding with the Blackpool Illuminations, the exhibition charts the use of neon in fine art since the 1960s, while a parallel exhibition in the upstairs gallery shines a light on lost neon sign designs of the 1930s. Of these anonymous sketches, it's unclear how many made it to production. Either way, the surviving drawings, unique to Blackpool, are works of art in themselves. They capture neon's hazy glow with finely smudged chalk on night-black paper, providing a rare glimpse into the medium's origin.

Downstairs, an eerie green light from the contemporary works snaps visitors into the present. 'Neon is at once futurisitc and inherently retro,' curator Richard Parry says of the lightform's timeless quality. 'And there's something sci-fi about Blackpool that neon just works with.'

This 'Blackpool-style' of chirpy, seaside neons come courtesy of Evran Tekinoktay's psychedelic TWIZ (2015) and BAMBI (2014), in the largest room of the gallery – two of a handful of dazzling kinetic pieces included. Opposite, an enormous graphic work from David Batchelor requires some serious sunglasses, and casts a lurid green hue across the space. Painted glass tubes are delicately wrapped around a reclaimed cement mixer 'which reflects Blackpool's working class history', the curator explains.

Neon's darker side (if it has one) is seen in the 'Text/Language' room, which delves into neon's relationship with the written word. Here, Tracey Emin's I know I know I know pulstates in her classic, impassioned scrawl, while an entire, Kosuth-grey wall is filled with his bold, meta-sentiments that explore the relationship between word, sign and meaning.

These pieces – particularly Kosuth's seminal work Neon (1965) – probe the artistic qualities of the medium. It is a lightform created to illuminate only itself – light for light's sake. This makes it an ideal material for conceptual artists like Kosuth – but a tricky thing to curate. Parry has managed beautifully by turning all of the overhead gallery lights off, building partition walls and covering all the windows. This way, different colour neons mingle in the middle, and darkened corners are left as rare, contrasting moments of calm. In these, we pause to reconsider the Blackpool Illuminations, questioning whether they have a place in art history books as well as tourist brochures.

'Neon is at once futuristic and inherently retro,' curator Richard Parry says of the lightform's timeless quality. 

Half sculpture, half painting, the selection of works force us to question whether the Blackpool Illuminations have a place in art history as well as the tourist books. Pictured: 2012, by Mai-Thu Perret, 2008. 

Blackpool, with its circling gulls, forgotten chippies and cheap beer, is not the first place you'd expect to find a Joseph Kosuth masterpiece nestled next to an iconic Tracey Emin. This juxtaposition of the great and the gaudy is precisely the joy of 'Neon: The Charged Line'. Pictured: installation view. 

Of the early sketches, it's unclear how many made it to production. Either way, the surviving drawings, unique to Blackpool, are artworks in themselves, capturing neon's hazy glow with finely smudged chalk. Pictured: Untitled sketch from the 1930s

INFORMATION
’Neon: The Charged Line’ is on view until 7 January 2017. For more information, visit the Grundy Art Gallery website

ADDRESS

Grundy Art Gallery
Queen Street
Blackpool, FY1 1PU

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Available from today are the Counter Editions Team GB prints, created for the Rio 2016 Olympic games.

The London fine art publishers created the official prints for the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic games. This year, they continue their relationship, carrying the torch for the meeting of art and sport, working with eight artists. Tracey Emin,  David Shrigley, Eddie Peake, Anne Hardy, Howard Hodgkin, Sarah Jones, Benjamin Senior and Sam Taylor-Johnson were all asked to produce works to celebrate Rio and support Team GB.

The prints produced offer up the chance to buy a token of Olympic celebration but are also a showcase of the artists’ personal styles. Renowned for his absurd play with sex and sexuality, Eddie Peake contributes Sweat, a fluorescent screen-printed poem just vague enough to reference both sex and athleticism. Royal Academician Tracey Emin, who has a history of collaborations with the gallery, produces True Love Always Wins a lithograph that features Rio’s Christ the Redeemer at the peak of a windy road, depicting the triumph at the end of a difficult course. She foregrounds true love with soft allusions to her recent ‘rocky’ marriage. David Shrigley’s cartoon Life is Fantastic, feature his signature thumbs up, doubling the Olympic torch as a cone of ice cream – somewhat satirical yet cheerfully celebratory. No doubt capturing the general mood come Friday when The Games begin.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Counter Editions website

No one could ever accuse Tracey Emin of resting on her laurels. Hot on the heels of unveiling new work at Lehmann Maupin in Hong Kong, the artist has followed that effort up with ‘Stone Love’ at the gallery’s New York space – a presentation of more new paintings, works on paper and neons, along with captivating embroidered works and a series of provocative bronze sculptures. The exhibtion is confirmed as her last before a year’s break.

Although a range of different media is on display, Emin’s subject matter is very much a continuation of her personal narratives and self-reflection. Large embroidered pieces depict the human figure (hers) in various states of repose. The figures presented are less idealised and more astutely represented, revealing a rounder form and even rolls of flesh depicted in a flurry of black threads on calico.

‘I’ve always been a figurative artist,’ she explains. ‘In the 1990s, I used the figure but with words. It’s like I just took the figure out of everything. Like the bed for example – it’s really figurative, except that the figure has got up and walked out of the bed. I was always drawing but the drawings were like a diary at the time.’

Small-scale bronze works, which are intentionally abstracted and primitively formed, are treated as three-dimensional iterations of her drawings, which are also present in different scales around the gallery. ‘I just want to be more hands on with everything. I want to be in control,’ Emin reiterates. ‘I want it to be me, so even if I make mistakes, they’re my mistakes. When I die, I want people to know that "she touched that". That’s really important to me.’

The title of the show riffs on David Bowie’s song Soul Love and explores the different notions of love, which Emin had considered well before Bowie’s death. ‘[It] is about love and the reflection of love; the desire to melt into the image of someone else, the fantasy of love,’ she says. ‘I’d rather keep that love sustained. For example, being in love with a stone is fine. It’s beautiful, it’s monumental, it’s dignified. It will never ever let me down. It’s a metaphor for what I prefer to live with.’

As for her much discussed sabbatical, Emin responds to the sceptics, ‘The reason why I’m having a year off is not to stop making art, it’s so I can make art. It’s all the other things that interfere with my process and what I want to do. I want to wake up everyday, think about art and make art. I don’t want to have an opening or do an interview, or any charity work, or sign off on anything. I just want to make the work.’

INFORMATION

'Stone Love' is on view until 18 June. For more details, visit Lehmann Maupin's website

Photography: EPW Studio/Maris Hutchinson. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin

ADDRESS

Lehmann Maupin
536 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

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There’s been much furor ahead of Tracey Emin’s latest exhibition, ‘I Cried Because I Love You’, not least because it is her first solo venture in greater China – and rumoured to be her last before she embarks on a yearlong sabbatical. Opened this week to coincide with Art Basel fair in Hong Kong, the frenzy surrounding the British artist’s major new show might only be overshadowed by the startling revelation she married a large, ancient stone in her garden in southern France last summer.

Spread over White Cube and Lehmann Maupin galleries in Central, the exhibition brings together older pieces alongside new paintings, drawings, embroideries and neon works. A narrative centred on her impromptu union (wearing her father’s funeral shroud in lieu of a wedding dress, no less) threads the duet of shows – fittingly, two become one.

‘It’s about me being able to not have to define myself within a gallery, within a space, within a country,’ she explains in the exhibition catalogue to Carl Freedman.  ‘I can just make my work and show it, that’s what’s important to me.’ To wit, the show is typically Emin: unabashedly confessional in its nude drawings of splayed female figures; yearning words scrawled in light and across canvases; and raw, explosive brushstrokes.

Emin doesn’t deviate far from the artist we know, yet, her new works seem bolstered by a newfound sense of self-acceptance, perhaps the result of her recent union. ‘You can find people to have sex with, but, you know, loving them is something else,’ she said. The marriage to the stone (it’s not a rock, Emin insists) is a metaphor about the longing to be with someone and the stability that comes with enduring love.

‘It’s my life. I think I’ve cried over more people that I love than people that I hate. I don’t think I’ve really hated hardly anyone,’ she has said. ‘I think my big mistake is loving people too much.’ However droll Emin is, the more she chastises journalists, the bitterer her acerbic tongue becomes: the more we try to love her.

INFORMATION

‘I Cried Because I Love You’ runs until 21 May across White Cube and Lehmann Maupin galleries. For more information visit the White Cube website

ADDRESS

Lehmann Maupin
4/F, Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street

White Cube
50 Connaught Road

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Some designers see their jewellery as the perfect canvas to speak literally, both to owner and perceiver. Scripted or written gems are not particularly novel – examples by Solange Azagury-Partridge, Diane Kordas and even JAR are well documented, with words such as ‘love’, ‘wow’ and ‘darling’ given the precious treatment. 

An enduring forty-year friendship, and subsequent collaboration, between British artist Tracey Emin and British jeweller Stephen Webster sees the latest addition to the word club. ‘As Tracey pointed out on my 56th birthday we have known each other for almost 40 years’, says Webster when discussing their ‘I Promise to Love You’ collection, a concise edit of rings, earrings, bracelets, tiepins and cufflinks. The idea first took seed when Emin created one of her signature ‘I Promise to Love you’ neon signs for Webster’s flagship store in Beverley Hills in 2010. ‘She said that she always felt that this work should be in a jewellery store, where people buy engagement rings and all the other trinkets of romance’, Webster continues. ‘And soon after I approached Tracey about realising her work through the medium that I know best, jewellery.’

The collection not only includes the written Emin word (‘love’, ‘more passion’, and ‘with you I breathe’) in her inimitable scrawl, in plain gold rings, bracelets, and more elaborate cuffs with the script picked out in diamonds, but also a series of charms based on her sketches of woodland creatures – a toad, a hare, and an owl are all rendered in her typically naïve hand. But most successful are the word jewels in Emin’s signature writing, now so part of contemporary culture as to be instantly recognisable as strokes from her pen.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Tracey Emin’s website, or Stephen Webster’s website

Fresh from its MUMA renovation, unveiled earlier this year, Manchester's Whitworth Gallery is currently playing host to an exhibition of textiles that make the crossover from the realm of craft into fine art. Featuring artists such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Tracey Emin, Grayson Perry, Ghada Amer and Kimsooja, the new show specifically gathers textiles that have been made to express social, political or artistic ideas – a practice that, as the curators note, has been growing since the 1960s.
 
Awe-inspiring pieces like Faith Wilding's web-like Crocheted Environment, otherwise known as 'The Womb Room', represents the wave of feminist artists who reappropriated traditional domestic crafts to create subtly subversive artworks in the 1970s; while Anne Wilson's intricately-stitched, damaged damask cloth Dispersions (no. 27) and Ghada Amer's embroidered Sunset with Words – RFGA demonstrate how contemporary artists continue to be influenced by these early pioneers.

Other art works touch upon politics of identity and nationhood, as well as the value of the handmade in the digital age. For instance, Lawrence Lemaoana’s fabric and embroidery work I Did Not Join The Struggle To Be Poor, is a sign made of the African National Congress flag that reinterprets the much-quoted statement made by former head of communications for the ANC, Smuts Ngonyama, when he was accused of unfair business practices in 2007.

As well as established talents, the show also introduces new names such as Mary Sibande, whose work explores identity in post-apartheid South Africa and stereotypes around the black female body.

'Textiles are a powerful medium for the expression of political and social issues that are current right now. They raise questions about the value of the local and global, making them an ideal vehicle to critique global capitalism and homogeneity of production,' says curator Jennifer Harris. 'Their history and close association with women and domestic crafts exemplify the revival of interest in hand making and the tactile in a super-speed, digital age. And there is a new urgency to feminist issues around the world, making people look again at feminist work made in the 1970s and ‘80s.'

INFORMATION
’Art_Textiles’ is on view until 31 January

ADDRESS

The Whitworth
The University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester, M15 6ER

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Last week, the Royal Academy of Arts unveiled a revamped Academicians' Room as a private club for its esteemed members. Opened ahead of the London institution's highly anticipated Ai Weiwei exhibition, the exclusive room, located in the RA's Keeper’s House, is a grand Palladian space originally designed by Norman Shaw (RA, of course) in 1883.

Faced with the daunting task of creating a befitting space for the Royal Academicians (a discerning band of elected UK painters, sculptors, architects and printmakers) as well as their guests and members, was Martin Brudnizki Design Studio, who chose to implement a refined scheme modelled on the traditional drawing room.

‘Our inspiration was guided largely by the original Norman Shaw room,' explains the studio's eponymous founder. 'With its perfect Palladian proportions, fine paintings adorning the walls and light cascading from above, it felt like your quintessential English drawing room.'

Building upon the room's existing grandiose architectural detailing, the studio have filled the space with carefully sourced vintage furnishings to create an ambience that Brudnizki describes as an 'haute-bohemian feeling'. Highlights include 1960s library chairs in tanned leather, mid-century Italian chairs upholstered in dark green mohair, and 1950s and 60s floor lamps, all arranged across a colourful Mamluk rug.

In the centre of the space, a pair of red corner mohair sofas, designed in-house by the studio, curve into an S-shape; a four-metre-long green mohair sofa that sits at the far end of the room is also a bespoke piece by MBDS.

On the walls, a rotating display of new works from Royal Academicians such as Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin and Allen Jones instantaneously make this space the most exclusive art gallery in the city. ‘The Academicians’ Room at the Royal Academy will be the place to see and be seen in,' says restaurateur Oliver Peyton, whose company Peyton and Byrne will be managing the catering for the new space. 'Martin Brudnizki Design Studio has designed a beautiful setting that will bring together like-minded people from across the arts world.'

INFORMATION

Photography: James McDonald

ADDRESS

Royal Academy of Arts
6 Burlington Gardens
Piccadilly
London, W1S 3ET

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Inflatable Swiss chalets, huge easter eggs and bare-breasted women beating resin blocks in a public park. It's the first week of December, and once again in Miami, the art fair has come to town, with this year activities neatly bookended in the north of the city by a show at MOCA of Tracey Emin's neon works - 67 created over 20 years - called Angel Without You and in the south by a retrospective exhibition of Ai Weiwei's work at the newly opened, Herzog & de Meuron-designed Pérez Art Museum.

Emin's archive of chaotically scrawled and spelt slogans - in a lofty blacked-out space - read like illuminated scribblings on a toilet wall. From inanities such as 'Is Legal Sex Anal?' and 'Is Anal Sex Legal?', to moments of beauty ('Love happens - like lightning') and self-knowledge ('I know, I know, I know' - crossed out three times), it's Emin in her best light.

Weiwei's politics often focus on the billions of Chinese who labour thanklessly in the creation of their country. At PAMM an enormous sculpture made of shiny metal bicycle wheels (a nod to both Duchamp and the only transport available to many working Chinese) has the feel of a war memorial for workers, recognising all those subjugated by the system.

Between these two poles, the business of the fair has gone along briskly, dealers having upped their game with some fighting work. (Miami is no longer the funsome little sister of June's Art Basel but a more serious player in its own right, particularly with its geographical attraction for the Latin American market.)

Gagosian's big gun is the Jeff Koons showstopper 'Baroque Egg with Bow', in scintillating turquoise and hot pink (1994-2008), a massive bundle of symbolism (from new birth to a stealthy restraint, suggested by the big bravura ribbon). At Sadie Coles, Sarah Lucas's 'Tit' chair (2012) - entirely 'upholstered' in stuffed stockings that pop up like perky breasts - is a ribald piece of feminism, poking particularly apposite fun at a Miami audience, where enhancements come as standard. And at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Martin Creed has constructed an elegant pyramid of bog-standard toilet rolls. It isn't ironic - more an act of transformation of this prerequisite of contemporary life into a perfect architectural component.

Other ways to get noticed include the booth of Neugerriemschneider, which Jorge Pardo has turned into a lush domestic space, lined with cheap fabrics more usually used to make Mexican pinafores (Pardo, who is Cuban, now lives in Merida). Everything is for sale, while other artists' work is encased in the shelving system he has created around the outside of the stand. And at Marianne Boesky, Roxie Paine's massive moving neon piece of a man being knocked down and getting back up could hardly be missed. 'I think it's how artists feel everyday,' says Boesky.

Beyond the Convention Centre, projects take on a more expansive form. LA artist Ry Rocklen has created an art bar, sponsored by Absolut, turning a patch of ground by the W Hotel into a basketball court, filled with chess and ping pong tables created from trophies and trophy parts, a comment, perhaps on the winners and losers that an overly competitive art market now creates.
 
Another large-scale installation came in the inflatable form of a Swiss-style chalet. Perched over the water at the Miami Marina Stadium, its polyurethane skin gently heating in the Florida sun, it is the creation of French artist duo Kolkoz for Swiss watch company Audemar Piguet. 'We love clichés and we love Pop,' say the pair. Indeed.

Jay Jopling opened his White Cube gallery on Hoxton Square in 2000 and it quickly became the new epicentre of a resurgent London art scene. But it wasn't Jopling who first suggested that the square - one of the oldest in the capital - and the unloved acreage of East London around it could become the city's prime artistic quarter.

Joshua Compston opened his gallery Factual Nonsense (a Wittgenstein reference) on Charlotte Road in Shoreditch in 1992 when the area was largely deserted (though, of course, a number of artists were already quietly going about their business in its empty industrial spaces). Compston had studied fine art at Camberwell but switched to reading art history at the Courtauld Institute. There he instigated the Courtauld Loan Collection, his first curatorial adventure, borrowing art from established artists such as Howard Hodgkin and Gilbert & George and up-and-coming artists such as Gary Hume and a certain Damien Hirst to be hung in seminar rooms. But it was at Factual Nonsense that he really began to get noticed.

Compston was determined to become a Warholian art impresario. And Shoreditch would be his Manhattan. (The letterpress catalogues and posters for the gallery's shows now look years ahead of their time. He was early to crafty-retro). With a babyish cloud of blonde hair, a sit-com posh accent and a statement white suit, he was at once a galvanising force and an unpredictable irritant to those who would become YBAs, both circus master and clown (The Guardian's Adrian Searle sums up the general take on Compston, calling him 'profoundly bright and profoundly irritating'.)

He is best remembered for a series of art-centric takes on traditional folk festivals, all held in Shoreditch. The first, 'The Fete Worse than Death', took place in 1993 with then relatively unknown artists such as Gavin Turk, Gillian Wearing, Mat Collishaw, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume manning stalls selling art. Damien Hirst dressed as a clown and produced his first spin painting at the fête (yours for £1).

Compston was last seen alive at the opening of a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition at the Serpentine gallery in 1996. He was 25. Hundreds came to the funeral including the artists Peter Blake and Gilbert & George. One of his pallbearers was James Goff, an unusually cultured and adventurous estate agent and CEO of local firm Stirling Ackroyd, who had befriended Compston and shared his vision for the area. Compston had said he wanted to 'explode the gap between art, advertising, entertainment, high-street retailing and real estate development.' In that, he was also ahead of his time.

A new show at London's Paul Stolper gallery, 'Factual Nonsense - The Art and Death of Joshua Compston', celebrates the short life of this catalytic engine of the early 1990s London art scene. Curated by artist Darren Coffield, the exhibition brings together posters, photographs, letters, diaries, videos and press cuttings as well as art works by Compston and early pieces by Hirst, Hume, Emin and others. Proceeds from sales from the exhibition will be donated to a fund for a memorial to Compston in Hoxton Square.

We caught up with curator Darren Coffield to find out more...

Like a lot of people, I first became aware of Joshua because his funeral got so much press. There was an extraordinary reaction to his death. And the attitudes towards him seemed very complex...
Yeah, in some ways the funeral was his greatest production. Hundreds of people turned up. I think most of them were there just to make sure he was dead and properly buried. He was 50% brilliant and 50% stupid. I think now we would realise that he was high functioning autistic but people didn't understand that then. So he just annoyed them.

He had this very posh accent and and he dressed in these posh clothes. He came across like this Terry Thomas character and people didn't know what to make of him. They thought he was taking the piss. And he really kept questioning people. Asking them why they were doing certain things and people didn't like that. But he was obsessed with William Morris and his ideas, and he just wanted to make the world a better place. He had this idea to lend a collection of American abstract art to local state schools. He had all these ideas. And he took people at face value. He was very trusting, sometimes to his cost.

He seemed to be ahead of his time in lots of ways. The way he promoted the Factual Nonsense shows. Understanding how art could change an area like Shoreditch.
There was no one in that area at the time. But 4,000 came for the first Fete Worse than Death. And then people started moving over from Westbourne Grove. And that was that. He had an idea to put on an art fair in a tent. Which is eventually what Frieze did.

And what do you think he would make of Frieze now?
He would have hated it. He would have thought it was just a trade fair.

Everyone wants to be a curator now. Do you think that is part of his legacy, taking something that had until that point been seen as very dry and academic, and adding this showman, impresario element?
Yeah. You know, there are courses in curating now, which seems ridiculous, but there wasn't anything like that at the time. But he got things done. He got Damien Hirst into the Courtauld Institute.

You use an amazing quote of Compston's in the exhibition: 'I am like an aircraft carrier, people land on me then take off.' It's a bit sad and bit angry but there is also an arrogance or at least a certainty that he had had a real influence?
By the end he was quite bitter that he wasn't getting any credit for what he had done and the art world was really excluding him. The YBAs, as they became, just seemed to be interested in making money and being cool. It was very cliquey. And that wasn't what he was into at all. He had these very utopian ideas of taking art out to people.

People still talk about Joshua. His presence still seems very felt. I just read a Q&A with Gavin Turk and he talked about what an inspiration he had been. And there was a big turn out for the private view of the exhibition.
Yes. All kinds of people turned up. Damien Hirst turned up but Damien hated Joshua when he was alive because he was always telling him to do things in a certain way. But then I guess once people are gone you miss them and think about what they were trying to do. I do think he was the conscience of that generation.

ADDRESS

Paul Stolper Gallery
31 Museum Street
London WC1A 1LH

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'I promise to love you,' writes a phantom scribe in a pulsating scrawl across a billboard in New York's Times Square. But this is no Hallmark greeting to be exchanged between lovers. It is actually penned by British artist Tracey Emin, who - in characteristically candid form - is offering a whole series of soul-bearing confessions to the masses in the city's busiest hub.

Throughout the month of February, fifteen gargantuan billboards will be given over to the video art installation shortly before midnight. Digital art purveyor s[edition] has adapted six messages from one of Emin's most well-known neon series into moving images, all based on the theme of love, echoing her notoriously tumultuous personal life.

'All my work is about emotion, it's about feeling, it's about subjection, it's about witnessing, it's personal,' said Emin during an interview, adding, 'It isn't cathartic, but it really is a means for me to express myself. It's very old-fashioned and very traditional.'

The installation is the latest instalment of a public art initiative titled 'Midnight Moment', organised and supported by the Times Square Advertising Coalition in partnership with Times Square Arts, for which the Square is transformed into a digital art gallery in the evening. The program debuted in May of last year, and past artists have included Yoko Ono and former Wallpaper* guest editor Robert Wilson (see W* 139).

Emin's digital artworks are available to buy at s[edition], the online art vault established last year by Blain Southern co-founder Harry Blain and Robert Norton as a platform to distribute digital work by leading artists (such as Damien Hirst, Bill Viola, and Elmgreen & Dragset) at affordable prices. Says Emin of the collaboration: 'I like the idea of original pieces of art going directly to people for a low price because when you're an artist and you get to a certain level it means you've sort of forced yourself out of the market for a lot of people. [S[edition]] makes pure art available. And also it's a new medium, which I think's exciting.'
 
It appears that Emin's neon valentines messages coincide with a newfound courtship of America's contemporary art scene. From April, the British artist will descend on Chelsea where she will be collaborating with Louise Bourgeois' studio for a new project. Lehmann Maupin will be showing a double billing of her work at its branches (both in Manhattan) during May and North Miami's MOCA is presenting her first major solo museum exhibition in the US at the end of the year.

Digital art purveyor s[edition] has turned Emin's original neon works into moving images for the installation. Pictured is the limited edition digital version of 'I Promise To Love You', available to buy through www.seditionart.com, alongside other works in the series. © Tracey Emin, courtesy of www.seditionart.com

Tracey Emin reflects on this unique project for Times Square

The English seaside town of Margate has had a strong impact on artist Tracey Emin's output, inspiring everything from her intense neon pieces to the embroidered statements emblazoned on appliquéd blankets and chairs. 'Whatever I do, part of Margate always comes with me,' she once declared. So it is with much excitement (and nervousness) that Emin embarks on her first major exhibition in the town of her childhood.

Hot on the heels of the London-based artist's 2011 'Love is What You Want' retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, 'She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea' is a specially-conceived show for Margate. Visitors expecting to see evidence of Emin's dysfunctional childhood will be in for a surprise. The artist seems to have made peace with her troubled past in this confrontation-free show, instead exploring themes of love, sex and eroticism. For Emin, these echo the spirit of Margate: 'There is an eroticism here, it's a very passionate place, it's very gritty,' she said in a recent interview with art historian Tim Marlow. 

The show takes place at Turner Contemporary, David Chipperfield's landmark building, which dominates the seafront next to the harbour. Displayed throughout the gallery is a showcase of over 100 mostly-new works, including drawings, monoprints, sculptures, tapestries, embroideries and neons.

ADDRESS

Turner Contemporary
Rendezvous
Margate
Kent
CT9 1HG

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The shake-up of the British art scene is finally complete, and the enfants terribles are the new establishment. Not that the original establishment ever really left - they just took a back seat, happy to let the young turks take centre stage. Now the working practices of 120 distinguished members of the British artistic community, from Maggi Hambling through to the Chapman brothers, have opened up their workspaces and working methods for the definitive state of the nation monograph.

Sanctuary is subtitled 'Britain's artists and their Studios,' but it may as well be called a field guide to the habitats of the contemporary artist, so comprehensive is its overview of the working environments of 120 of the country's best-known practitioners.

Here are the lofts, mews, sheds, warehouses and purpose-built studios of the new artistic elite, a diverse range of work spaces that help contemporary chart art's shift towards large-scale productions - the factory-like set-ups of Tony Cragg or Antony Gormley.

There are smaller practitioners on display as well, offering a rich insight into the emerging creative enclaves that have helped re-draw London's socio-economic map in the past few decades.

Each profile is made up of a Q&A that attempts to uncover the artist's relationship to their studio and the wider world beyond it, be it in London's East End or the wilds of Gloucestershire, and the role that space, time and solitude have on their work.

Tracey Emin's work may be as depraved, egotistical and confrontational as ever - there's even a used tampon thrown into one of her new pieces - but she's never been more in favour. Not only has she been swept up in the arms of the Hayward Gallery this month, which is staging a major retrospective of her work, but she's also being embraced by Louis Vuitton. The luxury fashion brand is currently both showing her work in store and flaunting a limited edition hand-rolled, hand-stitched silk scarf by Emin as its latest must-have item.

Watch an interview with Tracey Emin as she prepares for her Hayward gallery show

But let's start with the Hayward Gallery. For someone who has exposed just about every aspect of her life, it's amazing we've not had enough of Emin. Yet it's hard not to be absorbed by the way the British artist pieces together and packages the fragments of her existence - as embroidered scrawl on blankets and chairs, short-but-potent films and intense neon statements, all represented in this exhibition.

The works here (over 170 in total) have an extraordinary narrative pull, with a speedy stroll around the show likely to take several hours. Sure there's some repetition: the endless self-pity and the constant cries to be loved. But there's also huge poignancy to her work, particularly pieces like 'Knowing My Enemy' (2002) - a vast sculpture of a collapsed pier, with a hut at the end. Made in response to a letter from her father (framed on the wall of the gallery), it's her vision of the safe haven he longed for but could never quite reach.

But it's her drawings that capture us most, which are given a whole room at the Hayward Gallery: those fraught, trembling lines, sometimes incarnated as monoprints or etchings, other times as stitching. Which brings us neatly back to Louis Vuitton. In its New Bond Street Maison, the fashion brand has given over its Exhibition Space and Libraire - where it commissions, exhibits and sells limited edition works and books by artists (see W*136) - to Emin's works, in particular her prints.

Hung in the Libraire are eight new etchings by Emin, bearing her inimitable scrawl. Produced in collaboration with Counter Editions and Carl Freedman Gallery, these are encased in an Emin-designed leather case and the complete box set is being sold in an edition of ten. You can also pick up one of 50 hand-rolled, hand-stitched silk scarves, entitled 'Sex 21 Sydney (2011)'.

True to candid form, Tracey Emin’s outing at Jay Jopling’s West End institution – the White Cube – is a lesson in artistic angst. An intimate depiction of Emin’s well-aired soul, Those Who Suffer Love, offers a self -styled exploration of ‘love, life and loss'.

While these chosen subjects may seem hopelessly broad, Emin still comes up with some stirring stuff. Set to coincide with the release of her latest book – One Thousand Drawings – the show (Emin's first in London for four years) consists predominantly of her often brutal artistic scrawlings.

Centering on an animation of a woman masturbating – drawn in Emin’s trademark left-handed style – the film was produced (in the words of the artist herself) as ‘a symbol of lust and loneliness'.

Emotionally elaborate the show may be, but at the heart of Emin’s latest airing is a strong sense of draughtsmanship.

ADDRESS

25-26 Mason’s Yard
St. James’s
London
SW1Y 6BU

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