Tracey Emin Life without you Never For Sale

Tracey Emin (b. 1963, Croydon, South London) is one of the most significant and internationally recognised figures of the YBA generation, an artist whose work has transformed confessional autobiography into a rigorous and formally inventive visual practice spanning installation, neon text, printmaking, drawing, painting, embroidery, and sculpture. Emin studied at Maidstone College of Art before completing her MA at the Royal College of Art in London. She came to international prominence in the 1990s with works that placed her own life — her relationships, her desires, her shames, her history of violence and loss — at the absolute centre of her practice, in a move that was simultaneously bracingly personal and profoundly political.

Her most famous early works operate at the intersection of object, text, and autobiography. My Bed — her own unmade bed, surrounded by the detritus of a period of emotional breakdown, exhibited at Tate Britain and later sold for £2,500,000 at Christie's in 2014 — is one of the most discussed and argued-over works in recent art history. Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, a tent embroidered with the names of every person Emin had shared a bed with, destroyed in the 2004 Momart warehouse fire, survives only in documentation and memory. These early landmark works established her capacity for radical self-exposure, but they can obscure the formal range and discipline of the broader practice.

Emin's neon text works — works in which personally charged phrases are rendered in the cursive neon script she has made entirely her own — are among the most coveted objects in the contemporary market. I Want My Time With You (2018), commissioned for St Pancras International station, and The Last Great Adventure Is You exemplify her ability to compress complex emotional states into forms of direct physical beauty. Her monoprints, etchings, and drawings — of the female nude, of the reclining or curled figure, of faces in states of passion or grief — are among the finest works on paper being made by any artist of her generation: the line is raw, urgent, and absolutely assured. Etchings and lithographs range from thousands to tens of thousands of pounds at auction; significant neons and unique works on paper achieve six-figure results.

Emin is a Professor at the Royal Academy of Arts and her work is held in permanent collections at Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Portrait Gallery London, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, and MOCA Los Angeles.

Guy Hepner is an active presence in the Tracey Emin market, with particular expertise in her prints, editions, and works on paper. Our gallery at 177 Tenth Avenue, New York provides collectors with expert guidance on acquisition, authentication, and valuation. We offer free, confidential valuations for those wishing to sell Emin works and connections to buyers seeking her most important output.