Tracey Emin exhibition at Tate Modern will open in February 2026 and will be a "celebration of living"
- maxwell museums
- May 17, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 2
A major Tracey Emin exhibition is coming to Tate Modern in 2026. Titled Tracey Emin: A Second Life, it will open to the public on 27 February and will run until 31 August 2026. As Emin is Britain's most famous living female artist, it's expected this show will be one of the highlights of London's exhibitions this year.
The entirety of Emin’s 40-year career will be covered in this full retrospective. In fact, it will the largest ever survey of Dame Tracey Emin's career, and will be the most significant exhibition she's ever staged.
Visitors are promised career-defining works alongside material never exhibited before. There'll be over 90 items on display, spanning painting, video, textiles, neons, writing, sculpture, and installation.
There’ll be a focus on the recurring themes in her artworks, such as her raw and confessional approach, as well as explorations on love, trauma, autobiography, pain, loss and healing.
It's been curated by Tate Director Maria Balshaw, and is her final project before she steps down after nine years.
What to expect inside Tracey Emin: A Second Life
A highlight for many visitors will undoubtedly be My Bed, the installation that cemented Emin’s reputation in the public eye.
It was exhibited as part of Emin's nomination for the 1999 Turner Prize at Tate Britain (for which she lost out to Steve McQueen). It caused a media sensation and generated an unprecedented critical response, especially in the tabloid press. The media coverage helped install Emin and her bed in Britain's collective consciousness — something that exists to this day. It also drove record visitors to that year's Turner Prize exhibition with 140,000 people seeing the show.
Other highlights will be works from Emin's first solo exhibition at White Cube in 1993 — titled My Major Retrospective 1982-93 — and comprising a series of tiny photographs of her art school paintings from the 1980s which she destroyed following a difficult period of her life. These will be shown at Tate Modern alongside Tracey Emin CV (1995), a self-portrait and first-person narration of her life up until that moment.
Another highlight will be the poignant video work Why I Never Became A Dancer 1995, in which Emin recounts traumatic events from her teenage years in Margate and the boys in her life at that time. It is one of this author's favourite ever artworks.
A second seminal installation — Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996) — will also feature. It documents a period of three weeks where Emin locked herself in a Stockholm gallery attempting to reconcile her relationship with painting, which she had abandoned six years prior after her experience of abortion.
Emin's art after cancer
Emin is experiencing something of a renaissance in the art world right now. After surviving an aggressive cancer diagnosis in 2020 where she needed major life-saving surgery, she’s enjoyed a number of exhibitions which feature new works inspired by her cancer experience.
Tate says a number of these newer works will be included in this exhibition. These include a many of the ambitious large-scale paintings she has debuted in recent years which reflect this difficult period of her life, as well as the recent bronze sculpture Ascension (2024), exploring Emin’s new relationship with her body following her surgeries. These will be joined by stills from a new documentary, premiering at Tate Modern, showing the stoma that she now lives with.
Excitingly, the monumental bronze sculpture I Followed You Until The End (2023) will command the landscape outside Tate Modern, so even non-exhibition-goers can experience Emin's visceral work. The bronze was last seen in Emin's 2024 White Cube exhibition of the same name.
What is unlikely to make an appearance however is her 1997 piece Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, a tent embroidered with names of all the people she has shared beds with, from family members to sexual partners. It was destroyed in a warehouse fire in East London in 2004, alongside hundreds of works by leading British artists. Thus far Emin has never re-created it. Although perhaps this retrospective might be the moment she has a change of heart?
When announcing details of the exhibitions, Dame Tracey Emin said the show will be "a true celebration of living."
She added that Tate Modern is "one of the greatest international contemporary art museums in the world" and that A Second Life "will be a bench mark for me. A moment in my life when I look back and go forward.”
Tracey Emin exhibition tickets
Pre-booking your Tracey Emin exhibition visit is recommended, as it's expected to be one of Tate Modern's most popular shows of the year. Tickets are available to purchase right now and are £20 for standard adult tickets. Students will get in for free, and Tate members get in for free as always.
Tate's new Tracey Emin exhibition books
In a sign of the anticipation around this exhibition, Tate are publishing not one but TWO accompanying books.
One is the Tracey Emin: A Second Life exhibition catalogue. It broadens the Emin story of the exhibition, and celebrates her raw and confessional approach as she poses profound questions on love, trauma, and autobiography. At 280-pages, the catalogue reproduces Emin's career-defining sensations alongside works never seen before. You can pre-order it right now in hardback and paperback.
The other book is by respected art critic Hettie Judah, and her publication offers a more general introduction to Tracey Emin. The paperback offers a candid look at Dame Tracey's life and work, and explores the events and relationships that influenced her art, including her formative years in Margate, her artist peers, and the expressionist painters with whom she has identified across the generations. It too is available for pre-order right now.
2026 at Tate Modern
While Tracey Emin: A Second Life is one of the most anticipated 2026 exhibitions at Tate Modern, it will have stiff competition to be the most popular. That's because in June there'll be
a retrospective of the woman who is arguably the most-famous female artist of the 20th century: Frida Khalo. That too is likely to be a sell-out.
Other exhibitions at the gallery in the coming year include a show celebrating the visionary immersive works of Julio Le Parc, featuring his interactive installations and striking sculptures, as well as an autumn group exhibition — titled Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography — which will examine the international movement which first transformed the camera into an artistic tool.
Editors note: This article was updated in January 2026 to include new details about the exhibition announced after the initial publication.
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