On the eve of a major new retrospective at London’s Tate Modern, Tracey Emin stands at a crossroads in both her art and her life. The exhibition, aptly titled Tracey Emin: A Second Life, opens February 27, 2026, and offers an unflinching look at the artist’s four-decade career—a journey marked by turbulence, resilience, and a relentless pursuit of emotional honesty. As Emin herself told The New York Times, her life today is “unrecognizable” compared to the chaotic years that first catapulted her into the British cultural spotlight.
For those who remember Emin from the tabloid headlines of the 1990s, her story is one of profound transformation. Born in Margate, Emin’s early years were defined by rebellion and self-destruction. Yet, as The Spectator recently noted, behind the “enfant terrible” image lay a focused young artist, passionate about the work of Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, and the German Expressionists. She honed her skills at Maidstone and the Royal College of Art, learning to draw and embracing the alchemy of printmaking. “I loved the machinery, the old-fashionedness of it, the smell of the ink,” Emin recalled.
The emotional depth of painting revealed itself to Emin during a fateful visit to the Tate at age 22, where a Mark Rothko canvas moved her to tears. But her path to painterly mastery was anything but straightforward, punctuated by personal crises, public scandals, and years of creative searching. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that Emin, in her own words, found her stride as a painter—using thin veils of acrylics that “trail like blood or tears down the canvas.”
Perhaps no work better encapsulates Emin’s raw, confessional approach than her infamous 1998 piece, My Bed. A recreation of her own unmade bed, complete with cigarette butts, vodka bottles, used condoms, and stained sheets, the sculpture shocked the art world and the public alike when first shown at the Tate Gallery. “That bed kept me alive,” Emin told the BBC this week, reflecting on the work’s return to Tate Modern for the new retrospective. “It’s not an affectation, it’s a real thing. When I got up from that bed and looked at it, what I saw, I was disgusted and repulsed at the fact that I’d been laying in it and then I realised that I shouldn’t be because it had been holding me and keeping me alive.”
Now 62 and a Dame of the British Empire, Emin’s perspective on My Bed has shifted with time. “If I made it today, it would be tidy, clean, and boring,” she joked to the BBC, describing how her once-chaotic lifestyle has given way to order and contentment. Luxurious bedsheets, she said, are her “reward” for having survived a much messier youth. Yet, the emotional power of the original work endures. As The Week UK observed in its review of the new show, My Bed remains “the rawest, most powerful thing Emin has assembled.”
The Tate Modern retrospective is the artist’s first full-career UK show in 15 years, and it’s a fitting tribute to what The Times called Emin’s “brand of belligerent resilience.” More than 90 works are on display, tracing her evolution from the notorious Young British Artist (YBA) era—though, as The Spectator points out, Emin was never truly part of the YBA inner circle—to her current status as one of Britain’s most respected painters. The exhibition’s design, featuring moody Farrow & Ball paint and low-level lighting, attempts to tame the unruly force of Emin’s work, but, as critics agree, “the rawness still comes roaring through.”
Central to the show is Emin’s willingness to lay bare her wounds and regrets. The exhibition features not just My Bed, but also embroidered quilts addressing abortion, searing video works like How It Feels, and even intimate photos of her post-operative body following a 2020 diagnosis of aggressive bladder cancer. Emin is now in remission, but the experience has left an indelible mark. “Living without a bladder is really hard,” she told The New York Times. “Having a stoma is hard. I’ve had sepsis twice now, and I get infections all the time. Nothing can be improvised. Everything has to be planned around where the loos are, who you’re sitting with.”
Yet, out of adversity has come a new sense of purpose. “I’ve done more in the last five years than I have done in my lifetime,” Emin said, noting her work to provide free and subsidized studios for artists in Margate. She has also returned to teaching, “reinvesting my knowledge back into art,” and, as she puts it, “painting like a banshee.” Her later paintings, while sometimes critiqued for their limited palette, have been praised for their “beautifully fluent lines” (The Independent) and impassioned execution.
For Emin, art has always been a kind of salvation—a lifeline through trauma, heartbreak, and loss. “I need art like I need God,” she once declared. The sea and sunset of Margate, the beds and bodies of her past, all serve as recurring motifs in her work. The Dreamland Cinema, a fixture of her youth, now beams with her neon installation, “I Never Stopped Loving You,” a testament to her enduring connection to place and memory.
But Emin’s art is more than autobiography; it’s a vehicle for confronting social issues often left unspoken. She has used her platform to address child abuse, abortion, depression, and suicide—topics she insists are “really relevant and really important.” As she told the BBC, “If I’m talking about being abused as a child, if I talk sexually, if I’m talking about being [a] teenage [having] sex with older men—now it’s called grooming, right? It wasn’t when I was 14.”
Her willingness to speak out has only grown with age and recognition. “I feel now a duty to say a lot of things out loud, a lot, and to be fearless about it as well, because I think when you face death like that... you’re told that you’ve possibly got six months to live, you start thinking about your life.”
Not everything in Emin’s past is on display—her breakout work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 was destroyed in a 2004 warehouse fire. Still, the retrospective offers a comprehensive portrait of an artist whose life and work are inseparable. As Emin herself put it, “My painting is not about whether it’s a good or bad painting. It’s about why it exists, why it had to come out of me.”
For visitors to Tate Modern, Tracey Emin: A Second Life is more than an art show; it’s an invitation to witness the alchemy by which life is transmuted into art. And for Emin, it’s a chance to prove, once again, that second lives are possible—and worth celebrating.