In Life without you Never, Tracey Emin delivers one of her most arresting declarations of devotion. Suspended in warm white neon, the phrase “Life without you” stretches across the wall in her unmistakable cursive script, only to be punctuated by the word “Never” glowing in vivid red below and encircled for emphasis. The visual contrast between the two colours heightens the emotional intensity of the message, transforming a sentence fragment into a definitive, almost defiant proclamation.

Created in 2001, the work belongs to a pivotal period in Emin’s career when her neon installations had firmly established themselves as some of the most powerful expressions of autobiographical art in contemporary practice. By adopting the language of commercial signage and redirecting it toward confession, Emin turns neon into a conduit for vulnerability. Her handwriting—preserved in bent glass tubing—retains its immediacy, each loop and break carrying the trace of a human hand and a lived emotion.

The phrasing itself is deliberately fragmented. “Life without you” reads as a condition or a possibility, a moment of imagined absence. The emphatic “Never,” isolated and circled in red, functions as both refusal and plea. The composition suggests urgency: a thought that begins in reflection and ends in insistence. Emin’s work often navigates the tensions between love and abandonment, attachment and fear of loss. Here, devotion is rendered absolute, yet its intensity hints at vulnerability—the fear that such certainty might be tested.

The monumental scale of the piece—over three and a half metres wide—amplifies its emotional charge. Despite its intimate script, the work occupies space with authority. The warm white neon casts a soft glow, while the red element introduces heat and emphasis, almost like a wound or a heartbeat within the composition. The surrounding darkness intensifies the illumination, allowing the words to hover in space as both declaration and demand.

Issued in a small edition of three, the work maintains the rarity characteristic of Emin’s most significant neon sculptures. Its combination of scale, colour contrast, and psychological immediacy makes it a particularly striking example of her ability to transform private feeling into public form.

In Life without you Never, Emin once again demonstrates her mastery of language as sculpture. The work stands as a luminous testament to attachment—fierce, vulnerable, and unwavering—capturing the raw simplicity of love expressed without qualification.