Tracey Emin’s four decades of practice unfold at Louisiana

Tracey Emin’s major retrospective ‘A Second Life’ has moved to Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark, following its presentation at Tate Modern. The exhibition assembles works spanning nearly four decades of the artist’s practice, each piece a reckoning with memory, longing and the stubborn fact of survival.

The scale of Emin’s ambition becomes apparent in the galleries. Monumental canvases dominated by urgent brushstrokes in deep crimsons, dusty pinks and navy sit alongside intimate sculptural works cast in bronze. A crumpled bed, rendered in pale linen and topped with creased garments, speaks to the domestic as archive. Painted birds and geometric forms punctuate expanses of colour, their meanings deliberately obscured. The artist works across mediums and decades without apology, each body of work refusing the false coherence of a singular style.

The title itself, ‘A Second Life’, signals Emin’s conviction that art offers rebirth. “I didn’t let anybody stop me, I didn’t listen to anybody and I did what I had to do, because I had a vocation,” she has said. “Art is a vocation in life.” That vocation has not wavered across the four decades collected here, from her earliest provocations to her recent monumental works. The exhibition refuses to smooth over the roughness, the repetition or the emotional intensity that defines her project. What emerges is an artist uninterested in refinement for its own sake, committed instead to the messy, necessary work of making meaning from lived experience.

‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life’ runs until 18 April 2027 at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark. White Cube also presents Emin’s exhibition ‘I will miss you Yesterday / I will miss you Today / I will miss you Tomorrow / And that’s how it will Always be’ at its Paris gallery, on view until 18 December 2026.

Imagery courtesy of White Cube (@whitecube).