Tracey Emin puts her stamp on the cultural institution
After a three-year closure and the most significant redevelopment in its history, the revamped National Portrait Gallery opened its doors last week. Thanks to a major commission by Tracey Emin, they’re no ordinary doors either.
Hand drawn by Emin and cast in bronze, The Doors (2023) feature 45 portraits of women – to counterbalance the sculpted roundels, carved into the Gallery’s façade, of prominent male figures from history such as Horace Walpole and Sir Joshua Reynolds.
READDRESSING THE GENDER BALANCE
The three doors in the Gallery’s newly created forecourt, Ross Place, celebrate women from different walks of life – mothers, daughters, sisters and friends.
Emin says: “Women in history are greatly underrepresented. I didn’t want to depict specific or identifiable figures. I felt like the doors of the National Portrait Gallery should represent every woman, every age and every culture throughout time.
“I used myself as a mental template, but the end result is many different women, some that exist in my mind and some that perhaps exist in reality here and now, as well as from the past. And with all terms of art, it’s up to the viewer to discern what they feel and what they see or who they see for that matter. I want people to stand in front of the doors and say, ‘she looks like my mother, she looks like my best friend, my daughter’. People might also relate and see an element of pain or heartbreak in the images.”