Tracey Emin: A Second Life will look back over her 40-year career
Another massive exhibition to get in your diaries for next year, to go along with David Hockney, Schiaparelli, Henry Moore and the Bayeux Tapestry, is the massive survey of Dame Tracey Emin at Tate Modern. Opening in February, the exhibition, the biggest of Emin’s career, will feature over 90 works, including paintings, videos, neons, sculptures and textiles, showcasing the way she uses art and the female body to explore love, passion, trauma and healing.
The show will open with her early work, including tiny photographs of her art school paintings from the 1980s, which she destroyed during a difficult period of her life, from her first solo exhibition at White Cube, and a video in which she recounts traumatic events from her teenage years in Margate. Many pieces connected to Margate, where she now lives and has free studio-based art school, will feature in the exhibition, alongside works that address her experience of sexual assault and abortion. Her quilt ‘The Last of the Gold’, emblazoned with an ‘A to Z of abortion’ will be displayed publicly for the first time.
Her seminal installations, ‘Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made’ and the Turner-Prize nominated ‘My Bed’, act as a bridge from Emin’s first life to her post-illness and surgery second life. This second life is represented with her large-scale paintings, and pieces that explore her experiences of cancer, surgery and disability, including her 2024 bronze sculpture ‘Ascension’ and a new documentary showing the stoma she now lives with.
Speaking about the exhibition, Tracey Emin said: “I’m very excited about having a show at Tate Modern. For me, it’s one of the greatest international contemporary art museums in the world and it’s here in London. I feel this show, titled ‘A Second Life’, will be a bench mark for me. A moment in my life when I look back and go forward. A true celebration of living”.
Key Information
Dates | Fri 27th February – Sun 30th August 2026
Address | Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG
For more information | tate.org.uk
