Tracey Emin: A Second Life At Tate Modern Review

Tracey Emin is one of the most significant British artists of her generation, whose unflinching honesty has transformed contemporary art. A Second Life runs until 31 August 2026, and is already being hailed as one of the most important art shows of the year.

The largest ever retrospective of her work, Tracey Emin: A Second Life brings together over 100 paintings, neons, films, textiles and installations spanning four decades – from the notorious My Bed to new bronzes made after her cancer diagnosis. Reporting from the press preview, arts writer Amah-Rose Abrams charts Emin’s journey from provocateur to one of the art world’s most important voices.

The galleries at Tate Modern were packed with excited critics and admirers for this hotly anticipated show. On entering the exhibition, it was clear we would be seeing a different side of Emin, who arrived in the public consciousness in the 1990s as a member of the Young British Artists (YBAs). A curated retrospective of a living artist’s career is a rarer event than a new body of work – and all the more valuable for it.

Although the exhibition is not in chronological order, one of the first works we encounter is Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), in which she details traumatic sexual experiences as a young teenager, ending the film with herself dancing.

This confessional nature of the work is an early example of what we have come to know Emin for, personified by the work My Bed (1998). Nominated for the Turner Prize the year it was awarded to artist and director Steve McQueen, the work, which recreates Emin’s bed following a period of depression, is unflinching. The bed and objects in the work are original and real; the impact of this is both powerful and moving, and has not lost its impact nearly two decades after it was first shown.

Margate, Emin’s hometown, features heavily in the exhibition, from the recreation of Dreamland’s rollercoaster It’s Not the Way I Want to Die (2005) to the written notes about facing racism growing up in the seaside town as a mixed-race Cypriot. She details experiences of her and her family in raw detail, clear about the pain of it, but also not without a twinge of love for the place that she has now returned to.

Many of the works in the show deal with sexual assault, sex-shaming and abortion – from the tapestry emblazoned with the words “Learning Experience”, offering advice to women seeking abortions, and the film work How It Feels (1996), in which Emin explores her feelings after having an abortion for the benefit of women who have not had the luxury of processing the experience. Emin is known for her work exploring the darkest and most taboo of human emotions and not shying away from the impact of bad experiences, be that assault, abuse, depression or illness. Here we see our shared human emotions made material in many forms; later in the exhibition we see her work made during her recuperation from cancer.

The atmosphere around the work was one of thoughtfulness and conversation; this work means a huge amount to people and the early work around reproductive rights hits hard in an era where they are, in some places, being repealed. There is also a thoughtfulness and tenderness in the work, over-lit by her neons that appear throughout the show. A filmed conversation with the artist’s late mother, staged with children’s chairs and a small TV, drew laughs from Tracey during the installation, according to co-curator Jess Baxter as she recalled the process:

“It was just so extraordinary and forensic to see the way Tracey and Harry (Weller) picked up those beautiful objects, beautiful in the sense that they are artworks that really change the trajectory of contemporary art as we know it, and seeing them install it. I didn’t quite understand when Harry and Tracey said My Bed is like a painting, it’s like a self-portrait, until I saw it in that kind of seedy neon lighting with that work above it. It’s like walking into a Walter Sickert painting or a Manet, and this long trajectory of the symbol of the bed as a place of rest throughout the history of art.”

Emin’s embroidered works are beautiful, and we see them evolve into painting, which dominates the end of the show. Here we see an early bronze which has become a large part of her practice, and a series of paintings – many self-portraits, some with one of her beloved cats somewhere. There are self-portraits throughout the show, from early Polaroids to photographs of her stoma, which she wears following surgery. All sides of life are here, and the result is a real, visceral view into the work of a great living artist.

Tracey Emin: A Second Life runs until 31 August 2026.
Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG
Book tickets at tate.org.uk 

Main image: Portrait of Tracey Emin. Tate Modern 2026. Tate Photography by Sonal Bakrania