For more than three decades, Tracey Emin has made the intensely personal impossible to ignore.
Love, loss, illness, sexuality and memory run through a practice that has always placed lived experience at its centre. Now, A Second Life at Tate Modern brings together Emin’s work on a major scale, tracing the evolution of an artist whose uncompromising honesty has made her one of the defining voices of her generation.
Across painting, drawing, sculpture, film, photography, textiles and neon, the exhibition reveals the breadth of a practice often reduced to a handful of iconic works. What emerges instead is a remarkable consistency: the body, autobiography and emotion remain ever-present, while Emin’s visual language has continued to shift and deepen.
Her paintings in particular have become increasingly central to her practice. Loose, urgent and intensely physical, they carry the immediacy of drawing while exploring vulnerability, desire and the female body with an extraordinary directness.
There is also a sense of survival running through the exhibition. Following Emin’s diagnosis and treatment for cancer in 2020, her work has taken on a renewed urgency. The title A Second Life feels particularly resonant — not simply as a retrospective reflection, but as a statement from an artist still very much moving forward.
Emin has never separated art from life. At Tate Modern, that intimacy becomes the thread connecting more than three decades of work: raw, vulnerable, confrontational and, ultimately, deeply human.
Tracey Emin: A Second Life
Tate Modern, London
27 February – 31 August 2026