Tracey Emin Considers Eternal Devotion at White Cube

No contributor

The First New York Show by Tracey Emin in Nearly a Decade

Through January 13, 2024, Tracey Emin’s exhibition “Lovers Grave” presents a suite of new paintings at White Cube’s New York gallery. The UK-based artist’s first show in the city in eight years and her solo debut at the gallery’s New York location, viewers at the Madison Avenue gallery will find a suite of emotional compositions drawing from the artist’s interest in archaeological burial sites where human remains have been found and excavated in positions of embrace—a love that continues after death.

Tracey Emin Captures Eternal Love on Canvas

Aligning with Emin’s greater creative oeuvre, which draws from her own life while exploring ideas surrounding love, loss, desire, and grief, these new works radiate emotion, beginning with this idea of devotion even in the afterlife. Noting that such love is a fundamental element of life, Emin’s compositions suggest a new kind of life emerging from this buried love, in the artist’s words, “like a phoenix rising from the ashes.”

The figurative subjects on Emin’s canvases—sometimes alone, sometimes wrapped in the embrace of another—are surrounded by gestural markings and dripping in textures that reveal a physically involved painting process informed by the artist’s own feelings. The work’s surfaces have been washed in lighter colors or left with fields of negative space around their subjects, who, we can surmise, might be writhing in agony or bliss, and either could be true.

What’s On View

Visitors at the gallery will be left with the expressive markings and dripping red paint etched into their minds, contemplating the ache that comes with such raw emotion, like the hectically-entangled limbs of There was no Right way or The End of Her, that places three figures slouched over a dark mound suggestive of a grave. Other highlights include The Beginning and the End of Everything and a single figure in a frame of vigorous paint strokes titled Dreaming of Another World.