Collection: Tracey Emin | YBA Art & Editions

Tracey Emin (b. 1963) is one of the most significant and personally courageous artists of her generation — a member of the Young British Artists whose confessional, autobiographical practice has consistently placed her own experience, body, and emotional life at the centre of work that is simultaneously deeply private and defiantly public.

Born in Croydon and raised in Margate — a seaside town whose particular quality of faded grandeur and working-class resilience is present throughout her work — she received her MA from the Royal College of Art in 1989 and came to international attention through a practice that refused the separation between art and life that more conventionally minded artists maintain. My Bed (1998) — her unmade bed, with its detritus of used tissues, contraceptives, and empty vodka bottles, presented as a work of art — remains one of the most discussed and debated works in the history of British contemporary art. Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), a tent embroidered with the names of every person she had shared a bed with, demonstrated that the confessional impulse in her work was matched by a formal intelligence that mere provocation alone cannot achieve.

Her practice spans painting, drawing, neon, embroidery, film, installation, and sculpture — each medium chosen for its specific expressive potential, the neon works in particular combining her love of language with the luminous quality of light that gives her most direct statements their additional emotional charge. She has represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale, and her work is held in the collections of the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Stedelijk Museum.

Her secondary market is active and consistent, with works selling from four to six figures at Sotheby's, Christie's, and Bonhams. Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.