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Tracey Emin became a celebrated Britartist for not making her bed and showing it to the world. This didn’t impress me so much, I thought in fact that Emin was just a little weird. Our very own York Art Gallery has, however, managed to set me straight. The exhibition is housed in the smaller upstairs gallery (previously home to the Madman in the Minster collection) and while I had been expecting a giant space full of controversial sculptures, the intimate setting suited the pieces and me just fine. There is a small teapot sculpture, but the majority of the works are print, photography and textiles. It may have been a negative experience for her, but Emin studied Painting at the Royal College of Art when she was 25 and the fact that she can actually draw, something I hadn’t realised, really strikes you in this exhibition.
Spangly and exciting. That’s exactly how I feel about the exhibition.
Three self-portraits feature, two of which are Emin as small birds, delicately printed, and the third a much darker and perhaps more stereotypically Emin textile, based on Frida Kahlo’s Las Dos Fridas. The majority of the art really is gracefully beautiful, grace being a notion I never associated with the Tracey Emin of the media. In a particularly chipper mood last Friday, Emin writes in her column for The Independent: 'Today my studio is calling me. The paintings are all really happy and the paint wants to be used. It's all spangly and exciting. There's almost nothing that I hate, or nothing that depresses me.' Spangly and exciting. That’s exactly how I feel about the exhibition.
It changes your opinion of Emin, forcing you to see her not simply as an often depressed and bizarre contemporary sculptor, but as an often wonderfully creative artist who has fully opened herself up to the public. Her artistic control and expertise is nowhere more obvious than in her portrait Kate Moss, 2006, the etching on paper is thin and almost skratchy, only just passable as Moss and yet completely engrossing and exquisite. In Is What I’d Like To Be, Emin sees herself as a small Bambi-like deer, and in this exhibition, the image of Emin that I took away with me really was of her as a lot more innocent and fragile than I had ever imagined.
The Tracey Emin exhibition runs until 27th January. For an interview with the curator, download the latest Yorker Podcast.
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