Tracey Emin British, 1963

Tracey Emin, in full Tracey Karima Emin, (born July 3, 1963, Croyden, Greater

London, England), British artist noted for using a wide range of media—including

drawing, video, and installation art, as well as sculpture and painting—and her own

life as the subject of her art. Her works were confessional, provocative, and

transgressive, often portraying sexual acts and reproductive organs. Critics were

seldom lukewarm in their response to her. Like Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, she

was considered one of the YBAs (Young British Artists; also known as the

BritArtists) who came to prominence in the 1990s.

Emin and her twin brother, Paul, were born to an unwed mother. Their father, who

was married to someone other than their mother, was a Turkish Cypriot. Emin

grew up in the seaside resort town of Margate. She dropped out of school at age 13

and moved to London at 15. Two years later she attended Medway College of

Design (now part of the University for the Creative Arts), Rochester, where she

studied fashion. She was accepted without a secondary-school certificate at nearby

Maidstone College of Art (also now part of UCA) and earned a fine-arts degree in

1986. Thereafter she obtained a master’s degree in painting (1989) from the Royal

College of Art in London.

In 1993, in the former London borough of Bethnal Green, Emin and fellow artist

Lucas opened a store where they sold their own handmade items. One of Emin’s

earliest exhibitions took place in 1993–94 at the influential White Cube gallery on

Duke Street (1993–2002). That show, ironically titled “My Major Retrospective,”

gave a hint of things to come. It displayed personally significant artifacts from

Emin’s life, such as a hospital bracelet and personal correspondence, in addition to

a quilt on which she had stitched the names of family members and notes to them.

In 1994 Emin undertook a U.S. tour of performance art for which, sitting in her

grandmother’s chair, she read from “Exploration of the Soul,”” a handwritten

autobiographical book (subsequently published in 2003) chiefly about her childhood.