One Fine Show: “Tracey Emin, A Second Life” at Tate Modern in London

June 5, 2026 / Sophie Clearwater /

Tracey Emin, My Bed 1998. © Tracey Emin / Courtesy The Saatchi Gallery, London / Photograph by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Lent by The Duerckheim Collection

I had the pleasure of interviewing Dame Tracey Emin back in 2013, when I was a cub reporter with this outlet. The occasion would have been a gallery show, the motivator a pushy PR motivated to help sell the bronzes, neons and drippy body-oriented paintings that had recently come to define her mid-career output. I didn’t know much about her work beyond My Bed (1998), but my admiration for it was enough to make me want to talk to her. This was peak Tumblr era and I couldn’t believe someone could make something so personal and without affectation. She cocked an eyebrow at me when I sat down at our table in the restaurant at the Standard under the High Line. “I’m a much healthier influence, say, than Sylvia Plath,” she told me, of her legacy. “I am alive.”

This sui generis personality takes center stage at Emin’s largest survey, which just opened at the Tate Modern. Its title, “A Second Life,” mostly refers to what art has given her, and it’s possible that going through the exhibition one could come to know her just as well as if one had met her in person. The show was conceived in close collaboration with the artist, and gathers more than a hundred works across painting, video, textile, neon, sculpture and installation—four decades, from the tiny photographs of destroyed art-school paintings through to recent canvases and bronzes shown for the first time.

But the show is organized into two halves, a first life and the second that followed the artist’s public battle with bladder cancer and the radical surgery of 2020 that removed her bladder, womb, urethra, parts of her intestines and lymphatic system, and half of her vagina. Emin would encourage the reminder of these details, even when discussing the first half of the exhibition, the centerpiece of which are two extremely personal installations. First there’s Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), which records the three weeks Emin spent shut inside a Stockholm gallery, working naked, trying to reconcile herself to painting after six years of refusing it after the experience of an abortion. It has the canvases, the easel, the bottles, the bed. You could read it as the evidence of a breakdown, but let’s remember that the resulting work was in no way the last painting she ever made.

Then there is My Bed (1998), the Turner Prize-nominated installation that consists of a messy mattress complete with pantyhose, cigarettes, condoms. When it first debuted the tabloids affected all kinds of moral panic about drinking and casual sex, but now that it’s more or less a seminal work of British art you can see what it’s really about: the minor pleasures and major hassles that come with having a body. The body’s absence is made more present by what the Tate has installed nearby, a neon sign that reads, “It’s Not Me That’s Crying It’s My Soul” and a bronze of a one-limbed female torso. Emin’s post-90s work has been much more compelling than that of other Young British Artists, and the Tate has done a good job of showing us the throughline, which might be considered the healthy influence that Emin has had on herself.