joseph scissorhands: Tracey Emin: I Followed You To the End

Tracey Emin

I was in Bermondsey to see a different exhibition but decided whilst in the area to visit White Cube to see this show by Tracey Emin. I like Emin's textile works, but am not I must admit totally convinced by her paintings, and this exhibition did little to convince me otherwise despite her now positioning herself firmly as a painter. It's as if by sculpting in bronze and focusing on painting she is trying to leave a 'true' artistic legacy, equating her work with those of the greats in art history. Although not the biggest fan of Emin's paintings which I find very slight, I acknowledge her importance in the world of contemporary art and role as a mentor and inspiration to a generation of younger artists with her art school and residency programme. Emin's subject always appears to be herself, her frustrated love life, the anger at the abuses she has suffered in the past at the hands of men, and more recently meditations on her own mortality given her serious health issues. All of this is channelled into this body of recent work, and all of which with the exception of one was created this year. They are boldy expressionistic paintings, full of loose dripping brushwork in which the colour red features significantly. The red is strongly suggestive of blood and seems indicative of the pain and anguish the artist has/continues to endure physically and emotionally. It also seems to represent a meditation on her own mortality. The figures inhabiting these works are mainly reclining women executed in slight, ghostly line work, all firmly placed in a bed or domestic bedroom setting with the addition of a male in a few for company, or the artists cats watching silently, perched on top of a chest of drawers. A few paintings contain Emin's signature confessional text inscribed onto them explaining why she doesn't want to have sex, or why men have reduced her to this condition, all mourning the lack/loss of love in her life. As well as the paintings there are two sculptures and a short film. The sculpture in the main gallery space represents the lower half of a female form bent over and prone, a massive, hulking thing. Much more successful is the smaller sculpture entitled Ascension reminiscent in pose of a Rodin piece and again in context with the paintings suggestive of death and the soul ascending to the afterlife. I didn't stick around to see the film although it was only a minute long as I had no desire to see the artist's stoma, having had enough of Tracey's blood and gore by then. A few days later I encountered more of Emin's work in the form of the bronze portrait plaques on the doors of the National Portrait Gallery. I was there to see their current exhibition Frances Bacon: Human Presence. Anybody wishing to experience the work of another artist concerned with similar themes of love, loss and mortality, and handling it with more skill and gravitas, should visit the last room of the exhibition to see Bacon's powerful masterpiece Triptych May-June, 1973, a posthumous portrait of his lover George Dyer after having taken his own life two days before a major Bacon retrospective was due to open in Paris. It is a far greater meditation on love and loss, expertly handled and executed and almost too powerful bear looking at.