Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin was born in 1963 and grew up in a Turkish Cypriot family in Margate, England. She studied at the Maidstone College of Art and earned her MFA from the Royal College of Art in London in 1989. She was a member of the Young British Artists movement alongside Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Chris Ofili, Sarah Lucas, and Marc Quinn, among others.

Emin held her first solo exhibition in 1993 at White Cube in London, then a thirteen-square-foot room. Drawing on prehistoric art forms and the Expressionist painters Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch, she built a body of work, in painting, neon text, sculpture, and mixed-media installation, that treats her own life, including sexuality, abortion, and trauma, as direct subject matter. In 1998 she created My Bed, an installation of her own unmade bed surrounded by the debris of a period of personal crisis. The work was shortlisted for the 1999 Turner Prize and brought her to international attention.

In 2007, Emin became the second British woman to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, at the 52nd edition, and was noted for spending much of her exhibition budget restoring the British Pavilion itself rather than on new work. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2007 and appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy in 2011. She was appointed CBE in 2012 for services to the arts. In 2020, Emin was diagnosed with an aggressive form of bladder cancer; within weeks she underwent surgery to remove her bladder, urethra, lymph nodes, and part of her reproductive organs, and now lives with a urostomy. She has spoken publicly and candidly about the diagnosis and its aftermath, telling The New York Times that "living without a bladder is really hard" and that recovering from the disease felt "like being born again." In 2021, a selection of her recent work was shown alongside paintings by Edvard Munch in Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul at the Royal Academy of Arts. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2024 for services to art. In 2026, Tate Modern is presenting Tracey Emin: A Second Life, a career-spanning survey. Emin continues to live and work between London, Margate, and the South of France, where she also funds a foundation providing subsidized studio space and residencies for other artists.

Emin's early reception was polarized. My Bed drew both outrage and serious critical attention when it was first shown, and her frank treatment of sexuality and personal trauma was initially read by some critics as shock tactics rather than art. That view has shifted substantially over three decades: her election as a Royal Academician, her 2007 Venice Biennale representation, and a run of major museum surveys, including at the Musee d'Orsay, Tate Modern, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, have repositioned her as a central figure in the emotional and confessional register of contemporary British art. Her cancer diagnosis and recovery introduced a visible new urgency into her later work, which critics have connected to a broader late-career meditation on mortality, embodiment, and survival, most fully explored in the Tate Modern's 2026 retrospective A Second Life.

Emin's auction record remains My Bed (1998), which sold for GBP 2,546,500 (approximately USD 4.37 million) at Christie's London on 1 July 2014, a result that has stood for over a decade. More recent secondary-market activity has traded well below that peak: "Like a Cloud of Blood" (2022) made GBP 2.3 million at Christie's London in October 2022, and several paintings and neons have cleared the high six to low seven figures in 2024 sales at Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips. The gap between the 2014 high and subsequent results reflects the singular, historically significant status of My Bed rather than a decline in her market, which has remained comparatively stable given her low auction supply.

Emin's supply at auction is low and her market has historically rewarded works with clear autobiographical or historical significance, such as My Bed, over more decorative pieces. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance through White Cube, Xavier Hufkens, Galleria Lorcan O'Neill, or the Tracey Emin Studio and Foundation is the primary route to authentication, alongside fabricator certificates for her editioned neon works. Collectors should treat the 2014 My Bed result as an outlier tied to a singular, historically important object rather than as a baseline for her broader market.