Portrait of Tracey Emin. Tate Modern 2026. Tate [Sonal Bakrania]

FOR any unconvinced of the quality of Dame Tracey Emin’s art, this revelatory show is for you. With a poignant title, Tate Modern’s is the largest ever “survey exhibition” of her work, spanning 40 years of practice and characteristically honest self-examination.

The Tate refers to the 62-year-old’s “raw approach” whether exercised in paintings, drawings, photography videos and installations, textiles, neons, or perhaps, most notably here, writing and sculpture.

There’s a bronze Death Mask, the artist’s own, cast when she was aged just 39 and, one might now argue, particularly prescient.
There are more than 100 works featured, a personal history – taking in trauma, trouble and more – variously, from childhood and teens in Margate, to art school, bereavement, rape and sexual assault, abortions, and cancer diagnosis in 2020.

Tracey Emin, Ascension, 2024 [© Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2026]

“The extraordinary works” here, the Tate says, “move the visitor from Emin’s first life to her second life, post illness and surgery.”

Indeed, this is a woman who can openly reflect on and address illness and disability, with photographs of her stoma, for example, and a stark bronze of her body, Ascension, from 2024.

Yet the artistic journey is truly profound, from being one of the “Young British Artists”; through to her controversial Turner Prize-nominated My Bed (1998); to representing GB at the 52nd Venice Biennale and election as Royal Academician (2007); to RA Schools professor of drawing (2011); and a damehood (DBE in 2024).

In the strongest part of this exhibition Emin notes: “This room is about painting and feeling alive again. There are universal themes of love, loss, desire, sex, death.”

• Tracey Emin: A Second Life, at Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 9TG. until August 31. tate.org.uk