
It was called My Major Retrospective, and was autobiographical, consisting of personal photographs, photos of her (destroyed) early paintings, as well as items which most artists would not consider showing in public (such as a packet of cigarettes her uncle was holding when he was decapitated in a car crash). In November 1993, Emin had her first solo show at White Cube, a contemporary art gallery in London. In 1993, Emin opened a shop with fellow artist Sarah Lucas, called The Shop at 103 Bethnal Green Road in Bethnal Green, which sold works by the two of them, including T-shirts and ash trays with Damien Hirst's picture stuck to the bottom.
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Additionally, a series of photographs from her early work that were not destroyed were displayed as part of My Major Retrospective. One of the paintings that survives from her time at Royal College of Art is Friendship, which is in the Royal College of Art Collection. Her influences included Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, and for a time she studied philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.

After graduation, she had two traumatic abortions and those experiences led her to destroy all the art she had produced in graduate school and later described the period as "emotional suicide". In 1987, Emin moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, where in 1989 she obtained an MA in painting. It was more a time, going to Maidstone College of Art, hanging around with Billy Childish, living by the River Medway". In 1995, she was interviewed in the Minky Manky show catalogue by Carl Freedman, who asked her, "Which person do you think has had the greatest influence on your life?" She replied, "Uhmm. In 1984 she studied printing at Maidstone Art College (now the University for the Creative Arts). Emin and Childish were a couple until 1987, during which time she was the administrator for his small press, Hangman Books, which published Childish's confessional poetry.

There she met expelled student Billy Childish and was associated with The Medway Poets. She studied fashion at Medway College of Design (now the University for the Creative Arts) (1980–82). Emin was raped at the age of 13 while living in Margate, citing assaults in the area as "what happened to a lot of girls." Her work has been analysed within the context of early adolescent and childhood abuse, as well as sexual assault. This ancestor, Abdullah, was reportedly a Sudanese slave in the Ottoman Empire. Įmin shares a paternal great-grandfather with her second cousin Meral Hussein-Ece, Baroness Hussein-Ece. She was brought up in Margate, Kent, with her twin brother, Paul. Sexton Ming, Tracey Emin, Charles Thomson, Billy Childish and Russell Wilkins at the Rochester Adult Education Centre 11 December 1987 to record The Medway Poets LPĮmin was born in Croydon, a district of south London, to an English mother of Romanichal descent and a Turkish Cypriot father. In December 2011, she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy with Fiona Rae, she is one of the first two female professors since the Academy was founded in 1768.

Įmin is also a panellist and speaker: she has lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (2010), the Royal Academy of Arts (2008), and the Tate Britain in London (2005) about the links between creativity and autobiography, and the role of subjectivity and personal histories in constructing art. The artwork featured used condoms and blood-stained underwear. Later that year, she was a Turner Prize nominee and exhibited My Bed – a readymade installation, consisting of her own unmade dirty bed, in which she had spent several weeks drinking, smoking, eating, sleeping and having sexual intercourse while undergoing a period of severe emotional flux. In 1999, Emin had her first solo exhibition in the United States at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, entitled Every Part of Me's Bleeding. The same year, she gained considerable media exposure when she swore repeatedly in a state of drunkenness on a live discussion programme called The Death of Painting on British television. In 1997, her work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, a tent appliquéd with the names of everyone the artist had ever shared a bed with, was shown at Charles Saatchi's Sensation exhibition held at the Royal Academy in London. Once the " enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician. Emin produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Tracey Emin, CBE, RA ( / ˈ ɛ m ɪ n/ born 3 July 1963) is an English artist known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. Problems playing this file? See media help.

From the BBC programme Front Row, 22 April 2013
