What Tracey Emin’s Tate Modern Retrospective Leaves Behind

Eva Parker | Sep 1

Event: Tracey Emin: A Second Life

Venue: Tate Modern

Location: Bankside, London SE1 9TG, UK

Dates: 27 February – 31 August 2026 (closed)

Tate Modern’s Tracey Emin: A Second Life closed on 31 August after six months in the Eyal Ofer Galleries. The largest survey of Emin’s work to date brought together more than 100 works spanning painting, video, textile, neon, sculpture and installation, tracing four decades of a practice in which autobiography has operated not simply as subject matter but as method. Conceived in close collaboration with the artist and curated by Maria Balshaw, Alvin Li and Jess Baxter, the exhibition placed some of Emin’s most familiar works alongside recent paintings, bronzes and previously unseen pieces.

A Career Divided into Two Lives

The exhibition’s title offered more than a retrospective flourish. Tate structured the show around a division between Emin’s “first life” and the period following her cancer diagnosis and major surgery in 2020. Early works established the first-person language that made her central to British art in the 1990s: Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), How It Feels (1996), textiles, handwritten texts and installations in which experiences of sex, abortion, trauma and shame were made insistently public.

My Bed in a Longer Story

At the centre stood My Bed (1998), still the work most readily associated with Emin and with the media arguments surrounding the Young British Artists. Here, however, it shared the narrative with Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), the installation recording three weeks in which Emin attempted to return to painting after abandoning it for several years.

Seen within that wider trajectory, My Bed appeared less as an isolated provocation than as part of a sustained investigation into what remains after an experience has passed: objects, bodily traces, memory and the stories subsequently constructed around them. Tate itself used these two installations as the threshold between the exhibition’s “first” and “second” lives.

Painting After Survival

The later galleries shifted the register. Works including the bronze Ascension (2024), new photographs addressing Emin’s altered body after surgery, and large-scale paintings made the physical consequences of illness impossible to separate from the work. Yet the emphasis was not simply documentary. The recent paintings pushed the exhibition towards questions of mortality, desire and spiritual survival, retaining the exposed body while allowing considerably more distance between lived event and painted image.

That distance may be one of the retrospective’s more revealing propositions. Emin’s work has often been described through confession, but A Second Life suggested a practice increasingly concerned with what happens after confession: how experience is remembered, revised and transformed into form.

Beyond Tate Modern

The exhibition also extended into London itself. Around its opening, Emin’s neon texts appeared on billboards and buildings at 22 locations across 11 boroughs, from Lambeth and Croydon to Walthamstow and Tower Hamlets. The campaign connected the retrospective to a public-facing strand of her practice already familiar through I Want My Time With You, the monumental text installation first unveiled at St Pancras International in 2018.

What Does Forty Years of the Self Add Up To?

Presented in partnership with Gucci and supported by several Tate donor groups, A Second Life inevitably placed an artist once associated with the unruly margins of the British art establishment firmly inside one of its largest institutions.

But that institutional arrival may be less interesting than the question the exhibition left behind. After forty years of turning the self into material, Emin’s retrospective asked whether autobiography remains a record of one life — or becomes, through repetition, distance and survival, something capable of exceeding it.

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