Tracey
Emin

Tracey Emin (born 3 July 1963) is an English artist, actress and director, member of the Young British Artists group. The artist’s skills include painting, sculpture, sewing, photographs, video clips and installations. Tracy Emin became the honour of British culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: a member of the Royal Academy of Arts; one of the first women professors in the history of the Academy; the artist who was entrusted with representing Britain at the Venice Biennale! Tracey Emin also exhibits the bed with dirty undergarment and her personal diaries with shocking confessions in museum halls. She does not hide her passion for alcohol, swears on British television and marries ... a stone, wearing her father’s funeral shroud as a wedding dress.

Peculiar features of Tracey Emin's art. The artist’s works are inextricably related to her sex life, character, feelings and statements. Emin rightfully claims to be the most outspoken art worker who blurs the boundaries between personality and creativity. Love and sex, pregnancy and abortion, friendship and betrayal, philosophical reflections and drunken antics - the artist turns intimate moments of her biography into works of art, from oil paintings to video clips. The 1998 
My Bed installation was auctioned for $ 2.5 million — this is the amount the buyer estimated the bed, in which Tracy spent a week after a quarrel with her boyfriend: bed linen with yellow spots, empty cigarette packs and bottles, blood-stained underwear and used condoms. The creativity of the shocking Englishwoman is not limited to the intimate objects and scandalous antics. Tracey Emin possesses the techniques of figurative painting, drawing, photography, and the titles of her works can comprise a novel. “I try to interest my viewers, and especially ladies, with frank tenderness and weakness followed by unexpectedness of the actions,” Emin admits and turns intimate life into art.
 
Famous artworks of Tracy Emin: Friendship 1989, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 1997, My Bed 1998, Drunk to the Bottom of My Soul 2002, George Loves Kenny 2007.

Tracey Emin was born on the outskirts of London to a working-class family of a Turkish Cypriot and a gypsy. She had no money, no connections, just a combustible mixture of blood, talent and self-confidence. The life of the future star of contemporary art and professor of the Royal Academy of Arts Tracey Emin began in a quite ordinary way: the girl decided to become an artist, entered the Royal College of Art, had an affair with punk musician and artist Billy Childish and painted pictures in the style of Egona Schiele and Edvard Munch. An unexpected twin pregnancy, an unsuccessful abortion, depression — and Tracy went all out: Emin destroyed her paintings, became addicted to alcohol and drugs, and paraded her nature of a “hot bad girl”. Since 1990, the artist’s antics, which would ruin the reputation and career of any artist, have helped her commercial success and soar in popularity. Events of her life have become objects of her creativity, without constraint, censorship, or moral restrictions. In 1995, the audience was shocked by the installation Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995: a tent with 102 names embroidered on it. In 1997, the artist appeared drunk in a TV show studio and shared her thoughts on the development of art with the presenter and the audience in an obscene form. In 1998, Tracy led the audience into her bedroom when she exhibited “her real” bed with dirty linen surrounded by trash, in the museum. In the 2000s, the Neon project became a new scandal, because the bright inscriptions resembled advertisements for shops and brothels. Is she a talented artist or a brilliant provocateur? Tracey Emin has destroyed the boundaries between the personal and the public, reached the pinnacle of mental exhibitionism and turned her intimate life into art.