Tracey Emin: A Second Life at the Tate Modern

Tracey Emin at Tate Modern: A Second Life runs from 12 February to 26 May 2026 and marks the largest retrospective of the artist’s career. Through confessions, scars, and rebirth, Emin transforms her own life story into a radical reflection on the body, pain, and survival. Bringing together more than one hundred works created over four decades, the exhibition reveals how deeply biography and art are intertwined in her practice.

Entering an artist’s memory

A Second Life is not an exhibition you simply visit—it is one you move through. At Tate Modern, more than a hundred works unfold across paintings, videos, textile sculptures, and installations, tracing over thirty years of intensely personal creation.

Rather than following a strict chronology, the exhibition builds a fragmented self-portrait. Moments of love, trauma, and recovery emerge in fragments, creating a narrative that moves between introspection and renewal. Each room feels like stepping into a different chapter of the artist’s life.

At the heart of A Second Life

At the centre of the exhibition, My Bed (1998) functions as an emotional pivot. The unmade bed—surrounded by bottles, cigarette butts, and underwear—was once seen as the ultimate scandal. Here, however, it appears as the starting point of a new artistic language built on unapologetic vulnerability.

Nearby, the video Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995) revisits Emin’s teenage years in Margate. In it, she recounts a moment of public humiliation on a dance floor—an experience that shaped her desire to escape and redefine herself. The piece sets the biographical tone of the exhibition, oscillating between vulnerability, anger, and self-assertion.

The exhibition also highlights emblematic textile works such as Mad Tracey from Margate: Everybody’s Been There, where stitched words, memories, and declarations form a patchwork of personal history.

Further along, recent sculptures shaped by the artist’s experience of illness—such as Ascension—give physical form to the idea of a “second life.” The body appears wounded yet upright, fragile yet resistant, as if refusing to disappear. Together, these works trace a narrative in which each gallery becomes a stage in both exorcism and reconstruction.

Tracey Emin, My Bed, 1998. Installation presented at Tate Modern. Courtesy of The Saatchi Gallery, London.

From Scandal to Redemption

More than ever, Tracey Emin uses confession as a plastic material.

“Every work I make is a proof that I have survived”, she says

– a statement that resonates throughout the exhibition like a manifesto. Her recent paintings, stripped back and luminous, suggest another form of radicality. The lines are looser, the colours lighter, as if hovering between presence and disappearance. What once shocked audiences with its rawness now speaks with a quieter, more reflective intensity.

Tracey Emin, The End of Love, 2024 – Credit: Tracey Emin

The intimate becomes institution

By dedicating this major exhibition to Emin, Tate Modern acknowledges the lasting influence of an artist who was once seen as controversial but now stands as a central figure in contemporary British art.

Where her work once unsettled viewers with its blunt honesty, it now resonates through its emotional precision. The deliberately pared-down exhibition spaces allow the works to breathe, creating a nearly physical encounter with vulnerability transformed into strength.

A Second Life is therefore not simply a retrospective—it is a passage through an artist’s life. Emin continues to turn personal experience into a field of experimentation and affirmation.

Tracey Emin, Why I Never Became a Dancer, 1995 – Installation shot of Tracey Emin: A Second Life Tate Modern. Photo © Tate (Yili Liu). © Tracey Emin

Conclusion

As a teenager in Margate—as she recounts in her video Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995)—she was humiliated on a dance floor and dreamed of leaving. Thirty years later, her story is being told on a monumental scale at Tate Modern. In many ways, Tracey Emin at Tate Modern: A Second Life carries the quiet force of that journey: the silent revenge of a young girl who has become one of the most significant figures in British art. In Emin’s work, memory never erases—it transforms.