Sex and Solitude, the show at the Palazzo Strozzi by British “bad girl” Tracey Emin through July 20, feels like one of the most contemporary things to hit Florence in a long time. A working-class high school dropout, whose art centers the authentic female experience and monumentalizes vulnerability, exhibiting in the decidedly masculine public space of a Renaissance palace in the heart of the Catholic world? It’s hard to imagine this happening at any other time—and it reflects a historic shift in the zeitgeist whereby women of a certain age are finally having their moment.
All photos by Marco Badiani
61-year-old Dame Tracey Emin is certainly having hers. After a lifetime of hardship mined as the subject of her unflinchingly honest, confessional art, she has emerged triumphant and, for the first time in her life, happy. Everything changed when she was diagnosed with cancer four and a half years ago. “There was more chance that I would die than live,” she says. “So, I accepted the dying. I just thought, well, death looks after itself. Now I’ve got to start looking after living. The moment I thought that, I started to become happy. I never expected to be happy.”
Emin has achieved a mind-boggling amount since then. In addition to “painting like a dervish, like a banshee, like someone insane” after surviving and recovering from high-risk surgery, she has had major shows across three continents, including The Loneliness of the Soul in 2021 at the London Royal Academy, which paired her works with those of her idol Edward Munch. That show traveled to the Munch Museum in Oslo, where Emin unveiled a nine-meter-tall, site-specific bronze sculpture called The Mother, “her legs open to the Fjord.” In her hometown of Margate, by the sea in southeast England, she has opened a free art school, studios and low-cost housing for artists. Last year, King Charles even bestowed her with a damehood for her contribution to the arts in England.
Now, she is having her first institutional show in Italy. It’s all a far cry from her days as one of art dealer Charles Saatchi’s Young British Artists in the 1990s. Saatchi had the foresight that highbrow critics of the day did not. Emin became a household name in England by having “the most drunk moment on television” and was roundly dismissed (by chiefly white male pundits) as a self-indulgent exhibitionist for laying bare her darkest secrets, for example in her controversial installation My Bed.
Emin’s experience of her body has always been central to her work, and that body has been through a lot: poverty, rape, abortion, substance abuse, cancer. It is also on display throughout the Strozzi show, especially in bed, sometimes with a lover, often solo. The show is not a retrospective, though early work like her tapestries and a conceptual piece do appear. The focus is a corpus of more recent semi-abstract figural paintings and prints, like that in the show’s poster. Emin is famous for her way with words, and their savage poetry enhance every piece, either as part of the work itself (like the mesmerizing neon script on Palazzo Strozzi’s façade) or as one of her diary-entry-like titles.
Poles, like sex versus solitude, proliferate in her work. Like an emotional chiaroscuro, her pieces pull us into her agonies and ecstasies. Nothing is moderate; it’s all extremes of feeling and sensation, ferocious truths and soft underbellies. Unexpectedly, the roles of the titular subjects are currently reversed for the artist. “When I was younger, sex was really important,” explains Emin. “But now, as I’m older, the mental solitude and that idea of creation and the space for that is one of the most important things for me.” For Emin, love means pain, while art means freedom. “Art has always saved me. No matter how sad I’ve been, art has always been there to cradle me, to look after me.” Art mothers Tracey and, as she told the show’s curator, Strozzi director Arturo Galansino, she also mothers with her art.
Many women, including this author, experience her work as healing and cathartic because of her refusal to feel shame about taboo female subjects. She insists on conveying how it feels to endure something like abortion or depression. “No man has ever stopped me from doing anything I want to do, including my career as an artist.” Her words resonate today in this city with its first woman mayor and this country with its first woman prime minister.
Words may pervade Emin’s art, but make no mistake: she is a woman of action. “People ask me what I think about feminism. And I say I don’t think about feminism. I am a feminist.”
The giant bronze crouching figure greeting visitors in the Strozzi courtyard introduces emotion to Florentine public space on an unprecedented scale, a poignant declaration of the respect that Tracey Emin commands on behalf of all women.
