Artists

Tracey Emin was born in London. She is an autobiographical artist who expresses herself through a range of media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, needlework, and installation. Emin received her MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in London. She rose to fame as one of a group of contemporary artists referred to as the Young British Artists (YBAs) that included Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, and Angus Fairhurst, who began collaborating and exhibiting together in London in the late 1980s. In November 1993, Emin opened her first solo show, My Major Retrospective, at London’s influential White Cube gallery. In 1995, she participated in a show called Minky Manky at South London Gallery, for which she produced her famous work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995. This work was a blue tent embroidered with the names of everyone she had ever literally shared a bed with – from family and friends to, more intimately, lovers. The work was subsequently bought by Charles Saatchi and included in his controversial but successful Sensation exhibition that first opened at the Royal Academy in 1997 and then toured to Berlin and New York. In 1999, Emin exhibited My Bed (1998) – her own messy, dirty, unmade bed – at the Tate, which led to her being nominated for that year’s Turner Prize. She represented Great Britain at the 2007 Venice Biennale with the exhibition Borrowed Light, becoming the second woman to mount a solo show for the event, following Rachael Whiteread in 1997. The same year, she was made a Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts and was the school’s Eranda Professor of Drawing from 2011 to 2013. In 2013, she was appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her contributions to the visual arts. Emin’s works are in the collections of prominent museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, the Tate in London, and the Goetz Collection in Munich, Germany.