Tracy Emin is curled up on the red couch at her new home in Margate, and her kittens, Seagull and Pancake, are lying next to her. “Some critic,” she tells me, “said I was influenced by Matisse.” I said, “Oh, that’s what you mean?” She raised her right hand and placed it behind her neck, taking the position of Matisse’s famous Blue Naked. “And I asked, ‘You mean Matisse owns the way women sit?’
It can certainly feel that way, given the tendency of women to be naked in Matisse’s work. The same can be said for Picasso, Botticelli and Titian. But Emin is now striving to regain this territory – in a spectacular way. “The naked, naked female body is the big picture,” she says. “It’s archetypal, everyone understands it. It’s like a cave painting. ”
They cut off half my vagina. If a person has his half dick cut off, he will soon start complaining
As she speaks, I remember the images I had just seen hanging in the Carl Friedman Gallery, which borders her studio and living space in Margate. Written in black and white, with streams and patches of gray, these stunning new nude figures are larger than life-size and adorn sheets of paper two and a half meters wide. Made with a little help from the largest silk frame in Europe, they are, in my opinion, her best figurative works to date, their physical characteristics painted with anatomical insight and frankness that makes them as shocking as they are beautiful. Unlike Mathis, Emin does not need a model in a hotel room in Nice to know the woman’s buttocks, legs, back, abdomen and face. “Because it’s me,” she says.
The artist has been painting, painting and photographing for a long time, but these latest nude figures are her most majestic and honest so far, appearing in a show called Journey to Death. Depicting pain, fear and thirst for life, they are her response to bladder cancer, which she was diagnosed with in 2020, and surgery, which saved her life but changed her body.
“I experienced something quite horrifying” Е Emin’s self-portrait “Like the moon rolling over my back” Photo: Tracy Emin / Courtesy of Carl Friedman Gallery, Margate
Carl Friedman was one of the names in 1963-1995’s Everyone I Ever Slept with, a painting of Emin’s tent that sparked a storm in the incredibly controversial 1997 YBA show Sensation before being destroyed in a fire in warehouse. We go for lunch at Angela’s, a seafood restaurant on Margate’s Parade; as I laugh at the mussels, they remember how they met at a party in 1991.
Emin was struck by the “aura” of the young writer and curator, and they continued to tour the United States, reading Emin about his life from a cute little chair. They decided to reevaluate their relationship every six months: one night she went home to find him crying in the dark and realized it was a day of renewal. Or rather non-renewal. But they are still friends: decades later, when she decided to move her studio to Margate, he moved his family and business there.
That’s why Emin’s first exhibition of new art after her illness took place here – but also because Freedman has quite impressive on-site printing equipment. Upstairs, in his gallery, I see the huge silk she used to photograph her naked figures. “If I don’t make art,” she says, “I don’t feel alive. Much of me will feel dead: I’m not Tracy, I don’t exist. I felt much better after this job. It’s like, “Ah – ah – ah – I’m alive!”
There is certainly a wild life force flowing through these new works. In one called “Like the Moon Rolling Over My Back,” she crawls naked through a moon scene, her limbs gnawed with pain, her face turned to us in a melted mask of suffering. Emin has never painted or painted his face so much. “It’s not about what I look like,” she said. “It’s about how I feel. Some of them are beautiful. Some are ugly. Some are really fucked up. “
In The Mistress of Death, she is recognizable, dressed in a striped dress that pours out into space. This is her interpretation of a painting by Manet by Jeanne Duvall, mistress of the poet Baudelaire. But even in this beautiful work, the disease penetrates because Duvall had polio. Elsewhere we see a naked figure curled up on a bed. It’s called Don’t tell me about this kind of pain.
“It’s distorted and distorted,” she says, “but I just went through something pretty horrible. You know, if a robot hadn’t done the tailoring and sewing, my body would have scars all over his body. I have no scars, I only have holes. Now my body is weird. It looks weird down here – but I’m not scarred, at least from the outside. It’s me inside. Recovery is still ongoing. It will be two years in July. Recovery takes a long time. “
The disease penetrates … The mistress of death. Photo: Tracy Emin / Courtesy of Carl Friedman Gallery, Margate
Emin has always made art for his physical existence. It may have seemed “narcissistic” at one time, a word that is still guaranteed to provoke her. “Do people call Vincent van Gogh narcissistic?” But as she got older, her unique approach to self-portraits began to seem resilient and bold, especially as she now turned her attention to the consequences of her cancer.
“It all comes out in these works: the pain I’m in. Because I get a lot of pain. It’s all about mobility, muscles, everything – no lymph nodes, all that stuff. And also sexual pain. They cut off half my vagina. This is a big deal. If a man has his dick cut in half, he will soon start complaining about it. I also had to have my womb and ovaries removed, a complete hysterectomy. Is this sexy? No, of course not. Everything has changed for me. My whole life has changed. ”
And yet these works of art are sexy, I say. There is ecstasy as well as agony. A naked woman shrinks and masturbates – never a subject Emin has repulsed, but one she portrays here more fiercely than ever. “You can be a nun all your life and not have sex and still be really fucking sexy. It’s not about what you do with your body. That’s what you do with your mind, isn’t it? What you do with your hands, your sense of self, your own dignity. It’s all coming out – and I think it came out really strong with this job. “
I had to go into the cave, just sit there for a while in the dark and then get out
These, she says, are her black paintings that reflect the name given to the scenes of nightmare and madness created by the great Spanish artist Goya after he became deaf. “I had to do something like that. I had to go into the cave and just sit there in the dark for a while and then get out. So I kept thinking I wanted to make black paintings, black on black on black on black. ”
However, this desire began even before she was diagnosed. She believes she had a premonition of a sunny spring evening when her whole world suddenly went dark. “It was during the first blockade, just before the NHS pots hit. It was light, I was sitting in my living room waiting to look out the window and the TV was on – and suddenly it went out, the room was completely dark, and this ghost came to me. I said to myself, “Oh, hell!”
She still can’t explain the experience. And when she says darkness, I understand that she is both literal and metaphorical. “There is darkness. For every ounce of light, there is darkness. There are black holes in space. In every corner, in the corners of our mind, there is darkness. Maybe it’s inside us like a gnawing cancer. “
“Being from my background, speaking the way I do it, I’ve really achieved something,” at the Carl Friedman Gallery in Margate. Photo: Martin Godwin / Guardian
Conversely, however, for every ounce of darkness there is light. Emin has managed to make these powerful new works that oppose her illness because of what she creates in Margate: not only her studios, her home and Friedman’s gallery, which are united, but also a community. An entire side of the street is currently occupied by builders. Emin opens his own art school here in September with an admission policy that invites everyone, regardless of age or qualification, to submit a portfolio. While chewing ray wing, I find that I not only enjoy lunch, but also taste Emin’s social vision – because this restaurant will teach at the catering college she also creates.
“When I talk about how much poverty there is now,” she says, “I’m talking about people who can’t eat. When I was little, I went through this: no food, no electricity, no hot water. We knelt in a house. He knelt down. We had nowhere to live. And with a mother with one parent. When you have achieved what I have achieved, coming from this background, speaking the way I do, it’s like, “Damn, I really did something.” If I’ve done it, other people can do it. they will do it and I will show people that they can. ”
As she remembers her childhood at Margate, I can’t help but wonder what drew her back. Through her art, she told in horrible detail how she was raped at the age of 13 and left school. You may not think she owes anything to the place. She admits that when she first spent two weeks here a few years ago, she felt memories that threatened her sanity: “It was almost as if I had returned to my childhood. And it was so awful for me. “
But now it’s different when she came home properly, buying a place in town. “I feel a sense of freedom. I feel like I’m Tracy. I like to walk on the street. I like the smallness of everything. And the more I go around the city, the more I realize that there are a lot of things that I’ve blurred, a lot of things that I don’t really remember. “
Relationship with catering college … Angela’s restaurant in Margate. Photo: Martin Godwin / Guardian
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