Artists

Tracey Emin

Press release

Tracey Emin returns to White Cube Bermondsey with her solo exhibition, ‘I followed you to the end’, a presentation of new paintings and sculptures that journey through love and loss, mortality and rebirth. Drawing from a recent, transformative experience, Emin continues her exploration of life’s most profound and intimate moments, with renewed intensity.

The exhibition celebrates Emin’s expressive painterly vocabulary, focusing on the medium that has occupied and engaged the artist in recent years. Deft, impulsive strokes capture figures in the throes of becoming, while a palette of carmine, ivory, deep blues and black temper the volatility of physical and emotional states with intervals of contemplation and stillness. Serving as a fulcrum for the exhibition’s psychical journey, the titular painting I Followed you to the end (2024) elicits the plaintive anguish wrought from the complexities of love. Bathed in a tempest of red and black, the outline of a solitary female figure is framed by a handwritten exhortation to the lovers that have mistreated her: ‘You made me like this. All of you – you – you men that I so insanely loved so much. You are the ones that made me feel so alone. All of you – each of you in your individual way. I – I – I – was at fault to keep loving you. Like a fool I followed love to the end. Like the sad haunted soul that I am, I followed you to the end’.

From this wounded indictment, tensions emerge in other works, where the mourning of lost love is countered by a visceral drive for self-preservation. In the diptych My Dead Body – A Trace of Life (2024), the female subject lies supine, her pelvis thrust upward while her head founders beneath a crimson tide. This horizon line extends to the second canvas, where a passage avows: ‘I don’t want to have sex because my body feels dead’. Informed, in no small measure, by the artist’s recent confrontation with life-threatening illness, the work also speaks frankly of Emin’s personal reckoning with mortality. The private spaces that Emin’s subjects inhabit – beds and baths – transform into sepulchral vessels, securing the figure within. In I Kept Crying (2024), the figure, shrouded in a cascade of red paint, reclines in a bath that might also be read as a burial ground, with the taps transfiguring into crucifixes. Elsewhere, allusions to Charon, the ferryman of the Greek underworld, emerge in the red sails of Time to Go (2024) – a motif that, like many others, surfaced from the subconscious during the creative act.