EXHIBITIONS
TRACEY EMIN
White Cube
WE have a slightly different Tracey Emin here from the one who thrust her unmade bed into Tate Britain a few years ago. Mature, Royal Academician Emin is hardly settling back with her pipe and slippers, but this is a show that puts the emphasis back on her skills of draftsmanship. Not that her propensity to shock has abated. Emin is still interested in expressing the awful vulnerability and fears that lie behind notions of love, sex and her sense of her own femininity. Titled “Those who suffer love”, the show reveals love and life to be as difficult and traumatic as they are deeply, personally pleasurable. The latter is reflected in an animation that greets you upon entering, a gynaecological view of a stiletto-healed, faceless woman pleasuring herself, legs akimbo. Formed from Emin’s ragged drawings, it’s quietly honest more than it is honestly shocking.
Downstairs, drawings, embroideries and outtakes from old sketchbooks, and banal love poems in neon letters throw up Emin’s themes of loneliness, lust and loss. This is still our Tracey, after all, an artist whose rawest experiences have provided her with the bleak inspiration for her most self-lacerating art. But it’s a calm, simple – and rather slight – show, in which a quiet poetry has for the time being replaced the howling anguish.
Timothy Barber