Tracey Emin's paintings have an incredible ability to get inside you and inspire all sorts of ambivalent emotions, and her recent exhibition “I Love You Until Morning” is an emotional broiler at Yale University's Centre for the British Arts. I alternate between anger and sadness, disgust and awe. I asked the museum guard what he thought. He said: “It's more painful than the pain of love. But it's because of love that there's pain.” A young woman stood with her face away from the character's open legs and stretched out for five minutes with the crimson crimson. An older woman told me that it allowed her to relive her forty years of menstruation: cramps and emotional swings and her two abortions.
Amy's job is not to be timid, it needs attention. The paintings here are large – one is six feet x seven feet and the other nearly seven by nine feet – finished mainly with acrylic paints in red, black, blue and white. Nude female characters are scattered, exposed and vulnerable on canvas. So it feels like this (2018) is a spare line for a sitting naked woman, leaning backwards, legs wide, red paint pouring out between her legs. The face is not defined, nor is her hands. For all drawing simplicity, it comes with visceral punches. Did she just get raped and almost die? Is she in pain during a period of pain? Was she just born? Lost a baby? All these possibilities burst out from the painting, ruthlessly and hurt. Art critic Jerry Saltz once called Emin “one of the greatest artists in the world today.”
Born in a seaside town in England in 1963, Emin grew up in poverty and was homeless three times. When she was a child, she was sexually abused and raped 13 people. At the age of 27, she had a painful abortion with a doctor who refused to suffer. In her 22-minute movie How does it feel (1996), she talks about abortion and the way in which art is made is no longer “about fucking pictures. It can’t be something about vision…an old-fashioned idea that doesn’t make sense for the times we live in…it must be about where it really comes from.”
See also: Paola Mura reflects on the material universality of the works of artist Maria Lai
Installation work My bed (1998) is the bed where she sleeps on her own, with dirty sheets and underwear, empty alcohol bottles, pills, cigarette butts and used condoms. It was shortlisted for the Turner Award and installed at the Tate Museum in London, attracting a large crowd. My bed Push her to the world of art. She was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2006, the second solo exhibition in British pavilion history.
Emin held three exhibitions with her favorite artists (Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch and JMW Turner). Her nine-foot-tall bronze sculpture Mother Tower in Oslo Monk Museum. The commemorative work is a tribute to the mother, all mothers and the earth.
She was elected to the Royal Academy in 2007 and became Professor of Painting at Eranda in 2011. In 2020, Emin purchased a 1909 bathroom in Margate, Kent, a small seaside town she was born and raised. She renovated it and founded Tracey Emin Artist Residency (Tear), a studio two-year art school where all courses and lectures are free. TKE Studios provides an affordable studio space for twelve professional artists. “If my art can do something for the future, then I do something for the world.” In 2024, she was appointed deputy commander of the Order of the British Empire for her contribution to the visual arts.
“I love you till the morning,” she greets you with nineteen large acrylics on her canvas work, along with three bronze sculptures, 13 paintings and a six-second six-foot yellow neon light, to perform the title. One can visit the exhibition and study only the titles of the works, which are like Emin's memoirs (like any number of women's lives, frustrating and blobs). I said no,,,,, That's love,,,,, I'll follow you to the end,,,,, I want to be clean,,,,, Pelvic height,,,,, Sometimes there is no reason,,,,, You let it come,,,,, I never thought of falling in love – you made me feel like this. The exhibition is carefully curated by Martina Droth, with a detailed and exquisite catalogue including her excellent papers.
The paintings were layered with thin paint, not, as Amy said, “a huge thick masculine ball of paint.” She let the blood-red drip, the dark black obscure, the white mix, the thin rough blue lines illustrate. Describing painting feels like a damage to art. They swim in anger and compassion. They are violent, aggressive, intimate confrontation, full of pain, sadness and loss. I asked a man what he thought about Amy's paintings to watch the exhibition and he said, “All the mistakes I made with women are here.”
“Tracey Emin: I love you until the morning“As of August 10, 2025, Yale University's British Art Center in New Haven.
