Tracey Emin & London

Tracey Emin draws on her life experiences to make art that is confronting, vulnerable and totally uninhibited. She’s worked across many media, including painting, sculpture, bronzes, neon signs and installations. And her journey as an artist, as well as important displays of her work, is tied into London’s art story.

Croydon-born and Margate-raised Emin returned to the capital as a teenager, later studying at the Royal College of Art (RCA). She launched her career here after graduating in 1989 and became associated with the Young British Artists (YBAs), a renowned and rebellious crew of mostly London-based artists.

Her work has been exhibited extensively in London, including at landmark solo and group exhibitions at galleries like Tate, White Cube and the Royal Academy of Arts. It’s also been displayed beyond gallery walls. Her handwriting in huge neon greets travellers at St Pancras International Station. She also designed a poster for the London 2012 Olympics, a print of which is in our collection.

Today, Emin lives in Margate, having returned to the seaside town following a cancer diagnosis in 2020. She continues to exhibit in London and around the world. A major retrospective of her work launched at Tate Modern in 2026.

After completing her degree at Maidstone College of Art, in Kent, Emin studied painting on the RCA masters course between 1987 and 1989. She did part-time jobs to get her through the month, including working in the cloakroom at Soho ska, soul and R&B night Gaz’s Rockin Blues.

Emin was unhappy at the RCA. She thought the course was conservative, and she felt like a misfit among those she considered the university’s posher students.

She smashed her paintings in the college courtyard – “my only regret was never having it on film,” she later said. “I went ballistic slashing the sledgehammer around and no one could get near me. And it was simply because I had nowhere to put my paintings so they had to go.”

Eventually, Emin threw all her degree paintings into a skip. “It wasn’t because I didn’t care about them,” she explains. “It was because I cared about them too much.”

One of Emin’s earliest projects after graduating was a collaboration with the artist Sarah Lucas. For the first six months of 1993, the pair ran The Shop at a former doctor’s surgery on 103 Bethnal Green Road, back then a largely forgotten-about part of the East End.

The Shop was part gallery, part hangout space, part market and part studio. They sold handmade objects like badges, ashtrays and t-shirts emblazoned with slogans like “I’m so fucky”, “Complete Arsehole” and “She’s kebab”. They also displayed solo and collaborative art.

The idea of it being an open shop, rather than an exclusionary gallery space, was important. No one needed permission to enter. You could just wander in from the street.

The Shop was a hit. It sparked the area’s shift as a place for artists and where people would hang out. One Independent article from 1994 said, “the area boasts the highest concentration of active artists in town”. Fashion designer Alexander McQueen moved into his Hoxton studio nearby the following year.

In November 1993, Emin launched her first solo exhibition, titled My Major Retrospective 1963–1993. It was held at a new West End gallery called White Cube, founded by the gallerist and Emin’s friend Jay Jopling. The gallery gave artists like Marcus Harvey and Gary Hume early exhibitions too.

A bit like The Shop, Emin filled this boxy gallery with everyday objects, like memorabilia, souvenirs and teenage diaries, plus paintings, drawings and a patchwork quilt. This was Emin being as disarmingly open as ever, putting her own life on display via frank and personal works.

In her 1995 work titled Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, Emin sewed and stuck the names of all the people she’d, literally, slept with into the inside of a camping tent. It was first displayed at the South London Gallery, in Southwark.

The collector Charles Saatchi bought the tent. It was shown, along with other work from his collection, in his 1997 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition titled Sensation.

Sensation was as successful as it was scandalous. It featured art by a loose group of mostly London-based artists called the Young British Artists (YBAs), which included Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and Sarah Lucas. They were known for their open approach to art media, an entrepreneurial spirit and daring, often shocking artworks. Sensation turned YBA artists like Emin and Hirst into celebrities.

Perhaps Emin’s best-known work, My Bed, recreated the state of her own unmade bed after a period of heartbreak and depression. Alcohol bottles, pill packets, underwear and condoms are among the objects strewn across it.

Confessional and controversial as ever, My Bed was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize in 1999. It was displayed at Tate Britain among other shortlisted works, and a record 140,000 people visited the exhibition. Emin lost out to Steve McQueen that year, who won for his film and video works.

In 2007, she was elected as a Royal Academician, a select group of artists who support the activities and vision of the Royal Academy of Arts in Mayfair.

She was also a professor of drawing at the Royal Academy Schools between 2011 and 2013.

Emin’s art has been displayed across London’s public spaces. A Moment Without You, which positions five bronze birds atop five high poles, is part of The Line, an east London public art trail. Your Lips Moved Across My Face, written in neon in Emin’s distinctive handwriting, was shown on a walkway on the side of the Gherkin skyscraper.

During the London 2012 Olympics, Emin and 11 other artists, many of them YBAs, were commissioned to create the official posters for the Games. Some of these limited edition prints are now in our collection. Hers features a bird – a motif in her art.

I Want My Time With You is a 2018 neon light installation, made in Emin’s distinct handwriting, that stretches 20 metres across St Pancras International Station. Don’t be fooled into thinking it's just a romantic phrase. St Pancras is the home of the Eurostar, and Emin made this in the context of Brexit. “It’s a really great subliminal message sent out to the rest of Europe,” she said of the work.