Tracey Emin (b. 1963)

Highly personal narratives make up the threads that weave through all of multi-genre artist Tracey Emin’s works. Working with drawn and painted canvases, sculpture, tapestry, film, photography and installation art, Emin produces provocative pieces that mirror her own intimate experiences, from her sexual relationships to choices regarding her body. 

Emin moved to London from Margate to study painting at the Royal College of Art in 1987. During this time, she became part of the Young British Artists (YBAs) along with Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst. YBA was known for its unconventional and controversial take on contemporary art, which were on full display in Sensation (1997), a landmark exhibition at the Royal Academy that provided a comprehensive survey of the group’s works. Emin produced one of her most significant installations, Everyone I Have Slept With 1963-1995, for this exhibition. 

In 1999, the prolific artist was nominated for a Turner Prize for My Bed, another installation that showed her own unmade dirty bed with blood-stained underwear and used condoms. It was meant to underscore the reality of relationship anguish and suicidal depression. 

Emin would continue to showcase a series of confessional and startlingly honest pieces over the next couple of decades. In 2011, she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy – one of the first two female professors since the academy was founded in 1768. 

For her contribution to British visual arts, Emin was appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2013. About a decade later, she was named a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (DBE) at the King’s Birthday Honours.

Emin presently runs TKE Studios, which holds residency programs and provides artists a workspace to develop their work. Her pieces have been acquired by a number of significant institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Tate Modern in London and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.