Star of the art scene in-between provocation and personal tragedy
20 Years
Tracey Emin is one of the most famous British artists of contemporary art. The first big retrospective charts her career from the late 1980's to the present day. It is the most comprehensive and most important Tracey Emin exhibition which has been put together by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and which is shown as her very first solo exhibition in Switzerland. The Museum of Fine Arts in Berne offers the exceptional opportunity of experiencing her contemporary and older works in juxtaposition and to see behind the haze of glamour and personal tragedy which surrounds the star Tracey Emin.
Born in London in 1963, Tracey Emin became known in the field of
Young British Artists (YBA). She gained a degree of notoriety with her
uncompromising personal works. In her home country Tracey Emin is a
celebrity. Her works are being collected by famous personalities and she is a welcome guest on parties and an interviewee on TV. Moreover, her
personal column is regularly published in «The Independent».
She studied at the Maidstone College of Art and am Royal College
of Art in London. From 1998 on she had major exhibitions in Amsterdam,
New York, Sydney, Tokyo, München and Istanbul. She became a member of
the Royal Academy of Arts in 2007, and in the same year, represented
Britain at the Venice Biennale.
Highlights of the exhibition will include My Bed, perhaps the artist's most celebrated work (comprising her unmade bed, surrounded by the debris of her everyday life), which caused a scandal when it was shown on the occasion of the Turner Prize-exhibition in 1998. Other works in which she refers to her sexual past, her lack of schooling, her abortions as well as her affinity with alcohol are not less provocative.
The exhibition shows the full range of Emin's work in an exceptionally wide range of media: from her famous appliquéd blankets to video; from neons and installation to her intensely personal paintings and drawings.
