Tracey Emin. Sex and Solitude. - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi

Curated by Arturo Galansino

Introduction

Palazzo Strozzi presents Sex and Solitude, the first institutional exhibition in Italy dedicated to Tracey Emin, one of the most important contemporary artists of our time. Bringing together over sixty historical and new artworks, the exhibition offers an immersive journey into Emin’s deeply autobiographical universe, where art and life intertwine in an intimate exploration of desire, pain, and memory.
The title evokes two central aspects of the artist’s work: on one hand, the body and sexuality, expressed through images of intense physicality; on the other, solitude and vulnerability, which pervade her work and find expression in a figurative language charged with emotional tension.
This thematic exhibition traces her career from the 1990s to today, featuring paintings, drawings, sculptures, videos, and installations, documenting how Emin experiments with a wide range of materials and techniques, from embroidery to bronze, from neon to canvas, translating personal experiences into universal metaphors with a raw and direct visual language.
The body—both fragile and carnal—has always been at the heart of her artistic exploration, suspended between desire and suffering, love and loss. In this pursuit, Emin engages in direct dialogue with art history, drawing inspiration from artists such as Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, whose emotional and psychological intensity resonates in her work. Her work also enters into a broader conversation with the legacy of the Renaissance and the very architecture of Palazzo Strozzi itself.

“Every image has first entered my mind, travelled through my heart, my blood—arriving at the end of my hand. Everything has come through me.”
Tracey Emin

Biography

Tracey Emin DBE RA was born in 1963 in Croydon, London, and grew up in the seaside town of Margate. Her work spans drawings, paintings, tapestries, embroidery, film, bronze sculptures, and neon signs. The artist draws on her own life to inform her work, referencing deeply intimate experiences from her sexual history, abuse, and abortion to gender, relationships, and, most recently, her cancer and disability.

In 1999 she attracted huge publicity when she was nominated for the Turner Prize and exhibited My Bed at Tate Gallery, London. The work, which had been made the year before as the result of a period of severe emotional flux, features the artist’s own unmade bed surrounded by personal items and other detritus, such as condoms, blood-stained underwear, empty bottles of alcohol, cigarette buds. From there, Emin’s career continued to grow: in 2007 she represented the Great Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale, in 2011 she was made the Royal Academy’s Professor of Drawing, one of the first two female professors in the history of the institution.

Today Emin enjoys full institutional recognition. She has recently opened the Tracey Karima Emin (TKE) Studios in Margate, a professional artist’s studios entirely subsidized by her, with an additional free, studio-based, art school programme called Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR).
In 2024, she was honoured with a Damehood in the King’s Birthday Honours for her services to art.

Façade

Sex and Solitude

A large neon installed on the façade of Palazzo Strozzi welcomes visitors with a powerful visual statement: Sex and Solitude (2025), a site-specific work created for the exhibition, illuminates the Renaissance architecture with the show’s title in a vivid blue. This work immediately draws viewers into Tracey Emin’s universe, where writing becomes image and words take on a physical presence that amplifies their emotional impact.
Emin’s handwriting is a recognisable signature, a defining feature of her work that merges confession and assertion. Her text-based works, direct and essential, evoke intimate emotions with a visceral immediacy that deeply engages the viewer.
The use of neon, so emblematic in her work, is rooted in childhood memories of Margate, a seaside town shaped by the constant presence of glowing signs. Emin harnesses light as an emotional amplifier, transforming the written word into a pulsating presence.
“Neons always has a seedy connection. But then I think it’s sexy too. It’s spangly, it’s pulsating, it’s out there, it’s vibrant… For me it’s always had a beautiful allure.”

Courtyard

I Followed You To the End

The Renaissance courtyard is dominated by the bronze sculpture I Followed You To the End (2024). At first glance, its form appears abstract, with irregular reliefs and cavities that evoke a mountainous landscape. Yet, as one moves around it, the lower half of a female body with splayed legs emerges. The surface retains the traces of modelling and casting, maintaining a tension between its monumental scale and the intimate nature of its subject.
Collapsed and mutilated, it subverts the heroic stance of traditional commemorative bronzes, offering a vulnerable yet powerful representation that reinterprets the sculptural tradition historically used to immortalise upright and dominant male figures. This female body manifests in a fragmented, folded form, in stark contrast to the rigidity of convention. The rough surface, marked by the artist’s hand, heightens the dialogue between form and emotion, transforming Palazzo Strozzi’s courtyard into a space of emotional intensity.
The use of bronze has been a crucial development in Emin’s work. The artist recalls learning the lost-wax casting technique at a New York foundry on the advice of Louise Bourgeois, starting with small sculptures before progressing to monumental works.

Room 1

Poems

Drawing on memories and experiences, Tracey Emin’s art explores the nuances of sex and desire, transforming them into a raw and evocative narrative that captures the deepest sensations.
In the paintings displayed in this room, There was no Right way (2022) and Everything is moving nothing Feels Safe. You made me Feel like This (2018), love and desire intertwine with a sense of vulnerability.
Standing four and a half metres tall, Love Poem for CF (2007) is one of Emin’s largest neon works, where sexual passion is translated into poetry. Its message of heartbreak is based on a poem she wrote in the 1990s for her former partner Carl Freedman. Emin’s neons combine her distinctive line—both written and drawn—with her talent for language, which emerges in both her titles and texts.
She transforms light into emotion, using neon in an expressive rather than conceptual way.

“You put your hand / Across my mouth / But still the noise / Continues / Every part of my body / is Screaming / Smashed into a thousand / Million Pieces / Each part / For Ever / Belonging to you.”

Room 2

Exorcism

After a traumatic period in the early 1990s, marked by an abortion, Tracey Emin returned to painting in 1996—six years after abandoning it—with Exorcism of the last painting I ever made. For three and a half weeks—the time between menstrual cycles—she enclosed herself, naked, in a temporary studio within a gallery in Stockholm.
Working under the gaze of the public, Emin was both creator and subject of her own art. Visitors could observe her through wide-angle lenses as she produced paintings and drawings inspired by male artists such as Egon Schiele, Yves Klein, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso. While the female nude has traditionally been depicted by men, with women relegated to the role of passive muses in the artist’s studio, Emin subverts this convention, reclaiming ownership of her own image.
The photographic series Naked Photos. The Life Model Goes Mad documents this experience, merging the figures of the artist and the model. The tools and materials from Exorcism of the last painting I ever made, along with the works created during the performance, are displayed here in their original form, recreating the immersive experience of one of the most significant actions of Emin’s career.

“I stopped painting when I was pregnant. The smell of the oil paints and the turps made me feel physically sick, and even after my termination, I couldn’t paint. It’s like I needed to punish myself by stopping the thing I loved doing the most.”
“I hated my body; I was scared of the dark; I was scared of being asleep. I was suffering from guilt and punishing myself, so I threw myself in a box and gave myself three and a half weeks to sort it out. And I did. My only regret about this project was that I didn’t carry on painting from that moment. It took me another five years before I started painting again.”

Room 3

Coming Down From Love

Tracey Emin’s works explore the deepest instincts and emotions of human experience, moving between desire, love, loss, and pain. The body is central to her art—not only as a site of pleasure and vulnerability but also as a vessel of wounds and memories. Emin states: “I want people to feel something when they look at my work. I want them to feel themselves. That’s the most important thing.” She works instinctively, often across multiple canvases at once, alternating between moments of great speed and others of extreme slowness. She never plans the final image—the composition unfolds during the act of painting, with visible changes and erasures left on the surface, bearing witness to an intimate and ever-evolving process.
Always figurative, yet with gestures that verge on abstraction, Emin uses acrylics with swift, assured brushstrokes, employing colour as a direct and sensual expressive medium that heightens the emotional intensity of her images.
Her themes are equally intense: love and desire, joy and pain, life and death.
Titles such as Not Fuckable (2024) and I Wanted You To Fuck Me So Much I Couldn’t Paint Anymore (2020) reflect the rawness and immediacy of her poetics. Coming Down From Love (2024) reveals how Emin’s art weaves together intimacy and melancholy, transforming personal experiences into a universal language.

Room 4

Hurt Heart

Love is a central theme in Tracey Emin’s work, explored in its many facets, from desire and romance to pain. Some pieces explicitly depict acts of physical love, capturing the visceral energy of sex, as seen in the embroidered calico works I don’t need to see you I can feel you! (2016) and No Distance (2016).
A similar intensity permeates the small sculptures at the centre of the room, dating from 2017, in bronze with a silver nitrate patina: I wanted you more, and In my defence – I thought of only you.
Language is an integral part of Emin’s art, as in Hurt Heart (2015), where the juxtaposition of these two words underscores the connection between love and suffering.
A declared feminist, Emin employs materials that are part of her narrative, using calico and quilts—traditionally linked to female handiwork—to give shape to words, joining fragments with irregular stitching and deliberately unrefined phrases. Her technique also challenges the traditional definition of “art”, long dominated by men.

Room 5

Those who Suffer LOVE

Those who Suffer LOVE (2009) is a neon text piece reflecting on love and suffering. As Emin explains, “love rarely comes easily, and when it does, it usually fades quickly.” Her neon works do not simply explore love between individuals but evoke universal conditions: her handwriting captures thoughts and transforms them into aphorisms, elevating intimate experience to a collective dimension.
The same title, Those who suffer love, also belongs to an animated film (2009) composed of 150 individual monoprints. The focus of the video is a female figure with splayed legs, faceless and unidentifiable, that does not conform to others’ desires but asserts her own independence.
A recurring motif in her art, this kind of image finds few precedents in art history—always in works by men such as Gustave Courbet or Egon Schiele. By reclaiming this pose, Emin removes it from the male gaze, imbuing it with a raw and immediate expressive power.
Those who suffer love is not only a reflection on women’s autonomy and the expression of desire but also a critique of how art history and society have framed and constrained female sexuality.
Drawing, intimate and personal, becomes a public declaration, transforming a private moment into a shared expression that challenges notions of modesty, self-determination, and desire.

Room 6

A Different Time

In 2020, during a period marked by the isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Tracey Emin created a series of small paintings in her London home, transforming her domestic space into a refuge for memory as she prepared to leave it after twenty years. These works explore solitude, grief, and transformation, evoking ghostly figures in sparse interiors rendered in a palette of blues and greys.
My Mum’s Ashes – In The Ashes Room reflects the loss of her mother, whose presence lingers in the space through the urn that contains her remains. Painting thus becomes a space for confronting pain, but also for reconciliation with memory and time. Solitude is not an emptiness but a condition for introspection and growth. Thriving on Solitude suggests precisely this idea of solitude as an opportunity for renewal.
Some paintings seem to foreshadow a sense of unease. A Message From The Gods in Advance – December 2019 contains enigmatic words that act like a prayer: “You have gone now / I wanted you / I almost told you / I needed to tell you / But why would I / How could I”. 5 Hours and 5 Hours Long – With you in my mind evoke the time she spent on the phone in the bath with a man who she deeply loved at the time.

Room 7

I do not expect

Tracey Emin explores the theme of motherhood in relation to her own experience, stating: “I’m not a mother. I’ve never been a mother and never will be a mother. But I am, with my art.” This statement introduces the works in this room, which focus on the passage of time, solitude, and the unfulfilled desire for motherhood.
In I do not expect (2002), one of her celebrated appliqué (traditional embroidery and patchwork technique), the artist reflects on motherhood and death, weaving together fragments of thoughts, including: “I do not expect to be a mother but I do expect to die alone / It doesn’t to be like this / She went out like a 40 watt bulb / My brains all split up / Love to the end / I want it back – that girl of 17.”
The appliqué, made from hand-sewn colourful and floral fabrics, becomes a visual language that merges intimacy and vulnerability. A technique traditionally associated with domesticity and female labour, it is subverted, transforming into a tool for personal expression. The same chromatic tone characterises You were still There (2018) and It was all too Much (2018), which evoke the passage of time on the female body and the emotional implications of ageing.

Room 8

Take My Soul

The word soul emerges in Tracey Emin’s work with a rare frequency and intensity in contemporary art. Her art draws inspiration from a spiritual imagery not tied to formal beliefs but infused with a mystical sensibility. Free from dogma, her work explores the afterlife and the invisible, evoking visions that blur the boundary between the real world and unknown dimensions.
Christian iconography has been a source of inspiration for Emin since her time at the Royal College of Art when she would visit the National Gallery to study altarpieces, icons, and religious imagery. Among recurring themes, the Crucifixion takes on a central role: a universal symbol of suffering, it becomes in her work a metaphor for human vulnerability, loss, and rebirth.
At the centre of the room are five sculptures from 2013: rectangular bronze blocks, patinated white, featuring miniature figures of wild creatures, sometimes alongside a woman, evoking Tracey Emin’s connection with nature. Their surfaces are engraved with irregularly traced phrases, such as You have no idea how safe you make me feel.
Cast in a Long Island foundry where Louise Bourgeois had also worked, these bronzes appear to subvert the monumentality of traditional sculpture. Their surfaces evoke an almost childlike sense of craftsmanship, an intimate gesture that resonates with the feeling of fragility and protection conveyed by the words. Emin describes these works as sculpted love letters, where the female body merges with the natural world. The whiteness of the bronze, in its purity, reinforces the spiritual dimension, making these works manifestations of an inner dialogue between suffering and transcendence.

Room 9

All I want is you

Desire is at the heart of I Longed For You (2019), a large-scale neon that transforms a thought into a luminous visual poem. The title, evokes a feeling so intense it seems unbearable, “I longed for you. I wanted you / The only place you came to me to me / was in my sleep. / Too far for me to touch / with time you slowly disappear. / The Distance of your Heart.”
All I want is you (2016), one of Emin’s first monumental sculptures, created after her mother’s death, addresses themes of loss, love, and female strength. This sculpture extends Emin’s artistic language, reflecting her ability to translate two-dimensional ideas into space. Every surface retains the traces of her hands and fingerprints, as the bronze is cast from a clay mould shaped directly by the artist.
The result is a powerful female figure, with a rock-like mass behind her torso—separate from the body—that can be interpreted as a memory, something lost that, though distant, remains connected.
Similarly, in You Should have Saved me (2023), a painting reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s lithographs, the artist continues to explore the interplay between solitude and desire.

Room 10

The End of the Day

The exhibition concludes with a selection of works created in 2022, following Emin’s cancer surgery in 2020. Returning to printmaking—a technique she studied at Maidstone College of Art—she employs screenprinted monotypes.
These large-scale works explore the trauma of surgery and the healing process, with contrasts of white and deep shades of blue, grey, and black that evoke Goya and Manet. Despite their dark tones, they celebrate life and personal expression.
The artist confronts her transformed body, as seen in It Never Felt like This. Recreating her own image becomes an act of revolution: despite the advances of feminism, the female nude remains bound to the male gaze. Emin subverts it without compromise. Her figures—intriguing yet tense and contorted—express both pain and freedom: a woman portraying herself without embellishment. In Like The moon, You Rolled across my back, the moon—a symbol of femininity— weighs on Emin like the sky on Atlas.
In recent years, Emin has spent more time in Margate, a choice reflected in paintings such as The Sea came in, The Sea went out – It Left me. The solitude evoked by the exhibition title also emerges in her creative process: she now works only with one person, her creative director Harry Weller, producing more intimate pieces in her studio, under the constant gaze of her two cats, Teacup and Pancake.