Tracey Emin’s Portrait of Love After Death

Tracey Emin’s Lovers Grave is a visual treatise on how hope perseveres through grief. Emin has long been an iconic artist. Her evolution from Royal College of Art student to acclaimed YBA and Commander (CBE) of the British Empire by appointment of Queen Elizabeth II are among her more obvious achievements. In her personal life, she survived an aggressive bladder cancer and subsequent hysterectomy and cystectomy.

With Lovers Grave at White Cube’s New York location, Emin comes full circle from “Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made” (1996), a confessional work in which the artist grapples with grief, guilt, and anxiety following two abortions.

The five large-scale paintings on the gallery’s first floor, rendered in red, white, black, and blue, confront viewers with details of the artist’s personal life as if we’re privy to her private diary. At an artist talk last November, Emin explained that the works emerged from a 2019 painting of a couple entwined in a coffin. Scenes of ecstasy spill across all four corners of each canvas, leaving little between the lovers to the imagination.

Tracey Emin, “Is Nothing Sacred” (2023)

When read together, the 26 titles presented in Lovers Grave form a poem chronicling the highs and lows of a whirlwind romance. Themes of love and desire continue in smaller-scale paintings in the cellar, enormous acrylic works on canvas, and a tiny bronze figure on the second floor. Works like “We died again” (2023) and “Is Nothing Sacred” (2023) reflect the feeling of hopelessness that often accompanies the end of a romantic relationship.

What elevates Lovers Grave above standard meditations on love and loss is the artist’s awareness of her own mortality. Shortly after the end of the relationship that inspired the works, Emin was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given six months to live. The weight of her diagnosis comes across in “Like Another World” (2023), a giant acrylic on canvas wherein Emin depicts herself in quiet repose across her own bed. Nestled in the safety and solitude of her bedroom, she finds comfort in familiarities like her bedside Persian rug and the bust of Queen Nefertiti on her nightstand. Another study on isolation, “Yes I miss you” (2023), communicates fear; its solitary figure lies in a fetal position and appears to be drowning in blood. “I went home” (2023) takes Emin’s existential dread one step further; the figure’s face is completely smudged out, alluding to the way that imminent death can seem to efface all that our lives have meant.

Although Lovers Grave revisits low points in Emin’s life, the artworks convey the artist’s disarming self-awareness and remarkable optimism. 

Tracey Emin, “We Died Again” (2023) Installation view of Tracey Emin: Lovers Grave at White Cube, New York Tracey Emin, “Yes I Miss You” (2023)

Tracey Emin: Lovers Grave continues at White Cube (1002 Madison Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through January 13. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.