From 16 March to 20 July 2025 Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence will host a major exhibition dedicated to Tracey Emin, the contemporary British artist celebrated for works combining autobiography with a constant formal research of profound experimentation.
Tracey Emin works with a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, video, installation, and photography, with a strong focus on the body and human relationships. Life and art have always coexisted in her research, leading her to create works in which personal stories become existential metaphors. Vulnerability, rawness, and physicality are keywords that determine an artistic world in which desire and love are accompanied by pain and sacrifice.
Curated by Arturo Galansino, the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi will be her first ever held in an Italian institution. A selection of historical and recent works will convey the controversial and lacerating aesthetic of one of the artists who has most marked the image of women and the relationship between body and existence in contemporary art over the last thirty years.
Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin’s art is one of disclosure, using her life events as inspiration for works ranging from painting, neon, drawing, video and installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture. Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in candid and, at times, excoriating work. Emin’s art has an immediacy and often sexually provocative attitude that firmly locates her oeuvre within the tradition of feminist discourse. Her paintings, monoprints and drawings explore complex personal states and ideas of self-representation through manifestly expressionist styles and themes.
Tracey Emin CBE RA was born in London in 1963, and studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. She represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and was elected a Royal Academician in the same year. In 2011, Emin became the Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and in 2013 Queen Elizabeth II appointed her Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts.
In November 2020, Emin opened a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The exhibition, entitled Emin/Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul, then toured to the new Munch Museum, Oslo in spring 2021. The artist’s largest bronze artwork to date, The Mother, was unveiled in June 2022, a permanent public commission for Oslo’s Museum Island.
Emin currently lives and works between London, the South of France and Margate, UK.
Cover: credit Tracey Emin.