Most youthful indiscretions are forgotten or forgiven. No such luck for Tracey Emin. She immortalised her mess and missteps in My Bed and some people have never forgiven her for it. For the haters, Emin’s bed and Damien Hirst’s shark are all that is wrong with contemporary art. They’re not even that contemporary. The unmade bed and the embalmed shark are respectively 26 and 33 years old. In the intervening decades, Emin has made an unflinching study of the female body — her own in particular.
If her youthful indiscretions were paraded, Emin’s middle-aged ravages are laid bare. Her latest exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey is a great and gory show. For an artist so connected in many people’s minds with the now (even if that “now” actually means the Nineties), the works are strikingly medieval in feeling. Emin already has a damehood; these works put her in the realm of sainthood. Not sainthood in the sense of spotlessness: we’re talking gruesome saintly, streaming-stigmata saintly, moment-of-martyrdom saintly. Think of poor Saint Agatha with her severed breasts on a plate or Saint Lucy with her plucked-out eyes in a dish. Some of Emin’s upright portrait-format paintings here could be panels from a Renaissance altarpiece, each with its holy, bleeding heroine.
Lucy and Agatha had their dishes and platters. Saint Trace has her stoma bag, the result of brutal but successful treatment for aggressive bladder cancer in 2020. She has filmed it oozing and dripping for a minute-long movie that shows on repeat in a dark room. Emin may not flinch; I did. Why, when I’m sanguine about the grisliest painted crucifixions, do I wince at a modern-day medical miracle? Emin sees your squeamishness and shoots you a returning glare.
There are more than 20 large canvases, a series of smaller painted sketches (looking lost and unconvincing in the cavernous central corridor), one socking monumental bronze and another smaller bronze called Ascension. I’m not getting these religious references from nowhere. The massive bronze female figure, which shares the show’s title — I followed you to the end — is her largest yet. The White Cube had to take out a wall to get it in. If Auguste Rodin had been a fourth-wave feminist who had lived through the age of the ladette, he might have come up with something like this. She’s all bum, legs and bare soles. She could be a pilgrim praying on her hands on knees or the pose could be more invitingly explicit (you approach her from behind). Emin has proved herself an able provocateur and a brilliant draughtswoman. This third-act reinvention as a sculptor on a grand scale promises to be her most exciting period yet.
The paintings might have benefited from a more ruthless edit to a down-and-dirty dozen. Some are almost scarily intimate, with Emin or her avatar splayed and flayed, legs open, skin transparent to the canvas. Among the hits are a wonderfully snarling odalisque dripping scarlet paint and a figure entombed in a sarcophagus-like bath. There is lairiness in these lamentations: physical suffering without self-pity. Every two-bit influencer who posts a no-make-up selfie is celebrated now for being “brave”. Emin is the real deal: painting the unpaintable, brutally stripping the body back to barest, bloodiest essentials.
★★★★☆
Tracey Emin: I followed you to the end, White Cube Bermondsey, London, SE1, September 19 to November 10 (whitecube.com)
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