Tate Modern's Tracey Emin exhibition review — an outstanding story of survival
- maxwell museums
- 20 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Tracey Emin: A Second Life is Tate Modern's best exhibition in years. Here's my review of Dame Tracey's long-overdue retrospective, and her powerful art that tells us how life should be lived. ★★★★★
So… Dame Tracey Emin's new exhibition at Tate Modern is brilliant.
If you take nothing away from the next 500 words, just hear this: you need to book your ticket and go see it immediately.
Spanning her extraordinary 40-year career, the huge show is the largest Emin exhibition ever staged. It's been created in close collaboration with Emin herself, and is curated by the outgoing Tate Director Maria Balshaw. It brings together over 100 works encompassing painting, video, textile, neon, sculpture and installation. From intimate portraits to tabloid-magnet controversies.
There's a lot to take in. But the exhibition above all is about facing the end. About her — and our — mortality.
Emin’s cancer diagnosis is well documented. Her recovery is the second life referenced in the show’s title. This is ultimately a story of survival.
But for me what makes the ‘second life’ narrative so powerful is the acknowledgment that this too will end. A second life can only be well lived when accepting that it’s still your final chapter.
This is best encapsulated in the exhibition’s last room. At the centre is Emin's death mask on loan from the National Portrait Gallery, a haunting bronze that was cast when she was turning 40. Harry Weller — Emin’s studio manager — says of the exhibition’s final space: “I have built Tracey a mausoleum,” with paintings “that both greet her and bid her farewell.”
It’s not a perfect show. Text labels are pretty minimal. I wanted more of the context. She helped define an era, and is proper famous in a way artists aren’t anymore. This retrospective has its roots in the TV and tabloids of the 90s, and I wanted more of what it actually means to live a life so fully in the public’s glare.
The galleries are tricky to navigate too, with major bottlenecks at the two video pieces. While most video art is dreadful, Emin has created masterpieces. Why I Never Became A Dancer — which morphs from grainy footage of her seaside hometown of Margate to an uplifting, epowering clap back to bullies — I would argue is one of the greatest contemporary artworks ever made. Visitors, rightly, want to soak up every second — and so the crowds swell.
And there’s something quite off with the lighting of the defining artwork of the show — the still-brilliant-to-this-day My Bed — that I can’t quite put my finger on.
But it’s a testament to Emin that even with these not-insignificant quibbles, the exhibition is still outstanding. And one of the best at Tate Modern for years.
Perhaps it’s because as visitors, being reminded of our finite time on this planet is — counterintuitively — a life affirming message. You are faced with thinking about your own precious time on this planet and what it means to live our oh-so-fleeting lives.
"I don't want [visitors] to think about my life. I want them to think about their own life," Emin says in the exhibition's catalogue. Job done I say.
Tracey Emin: A Second Life runs at Tate Modern until 31 August 2026
Tracey Emin exhibition book
Dive deeper into Tracey Emin: A Second Life with the accompanying book
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