“Being an artist isn’t about making something beautiful […] Our job as artists is to battle with the soul.”
—Tracey EminDrawn tremulously into life through a lyrically sparse sense of line and intensely expressive use of restrained colour, This is life without you - You made me Feel Like This exemplifies the disarming force and emotional power of Tracey Emin’s unapologetically confessional practice. Picked out in skeins of deep red paint, the reclining nude at the centre emerges from a billowing expanse of thin washes of white and pink tones; like a memory slowly crystallising into form, Emin gives body to emotional experience here, celebrating paint’s ability to transmit personal trauma and pain. Included in Emin’s sensational 2020 Royal Academy presentation of her painting alongside her great artistic hero Edvard Munch, This is life without you - You made me Feel Like This embodies the energy, vulnerability, and disarming honesty that best characterises her wide-ranging practice. 

 

Emin and The Loneliness of the Soul

Since she first exploded onto the London scene as one of the leading figures of the iconoclastic and irreverent YBA group in the late 1980s, Tracey Emin has continued to shock and challenge viewers in her unapologetic presentation of the more painful emotional truths that we might hide from in ourselves. Marked by a profound sincerity and unabashed directness in her excavation of personal trauma, Emin’s uniquely confessional mode has been developed across a vast range of textiles, installations, drawings, film and text, connected through their ‘willingness to expose the sexuality and vulnerability of her own female body and biography.’ⁱ

In the earliest years of developing her practice as a student at the Royal College, Emin honed her craft as a painter, her work then as now preoccupied with questions of intimacy and a kind of radical self-exposure, revealing the innermost desires, traumas, and intrusive doubts that make up a rich - if sometimes painfully acute - inner landscape. A traumatic abortion marked the emotional rupture with this nascent aspect of her practice, while broader art world trends conspired to push painting to the margins in favour of more conceptually driven work during the 1980s and '90s. During this period, Emin turned increasingly to writing as a way of giving shape to these turbulent inner landscapes, and her first major solo show with White Cube, wittily dubbed My Major Retrospective 1963-1993, included diaries and letters, toys and photographs - all the material remnants of our messy emotional lives that would become infamously central to her practice with site-specific performances like Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made and her 1998 Turner Prize-nominated work, My Bed. Born out of the distress of a breakup and resulting breakdown, the piece is a provocative portrait of the artist, their emotional devastation, and self-destructive tendencies told through the detritus of everyday life. As the site of many of our more extreme states of being - birth, death, erotic pleasure, sickness, and emotional distress - the bed is a potent symbol and arena of activity for Emin where the passion and pain that make up human existence are at its most communicable. Its presence implied here, This is life without you - You made me Feel Like This not only underscores the consistency of Emin’s confessional approaches to emotional honesty through artmaking, but of the painterly sophistication and directness with which her mature work transmits this.

 

Working through the trauma of her own childhood, Emin’s teenage discovery of Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch was revelatory, their raw, expressive treatment of heightened states of being and the way these are registered in the body being instantly recognisable to her. Much of Schiele’s tortured sense of line and its extreme, expressive capacity can be traced through Emin’s drawing and painting, and makes itself powerfully present in the intimacy and immediacy of the present work. Nevertheless in its emotional rawness and courageous examination of suffering and desire, longing and loss, This is life without you - You made me Feel Like This and the broader cycle of works to which it belongs sits in most direct dialogue with Munch’s portraits of existential angst. Indeed, in what could serve as a description of her own practice, Emin sensitively describes her affinity to the artist who ‘understands the destructive qualities of love, the feelings of isolation and vulnerability, but […] done with honesty and in the end with a kind of tenderness.’ⁱⁱ Like Emin, Munch was similarly preoccupied with questions of sexuality, love, loneliness, the body, and the self - notably portraying himself as Marat, shown murdered in his bed while a thinly disguised nude portrait of his once lover Tull Larsen as Charlotte Corday stares rigidly out at us. Painted following the explosive breakdown of their own turbulent relationship, the work speaks directly to Emin’s own approach to the creative act as a way of simultaneously understanding and overcoming emotional pain. 
“I feel this world come through me. Sometimes it feels wonderful, sometimes it hurts. I then translate my emotions and feelings through my art. Making art helps me breathe, helps me stop my mind from crashing in.”
—Tracey EminPainted shortly after the death of her own mother, This is life without you - You made me Feel Like This is preoccupied with questions of maternity, conflating this profound recent loss with the poignant ‘absence of the children she never had and the lovers who disappeared’, returned to variously across her practice.ⁱⁱⁱ In preparing the cycle of works for the Royal Academy pairing, Emin was vocal in her desire to bring together works which spoke to and of the soul, and about what it feels like to experience pain alone. Establishing immediate pictorial relationships between the head and groin of the figure here in their more intensely worked, agitated treatment of line and deep colouration, Emin expresses the confluence of physical and psychic distress with remarkable dexterity and lyricism, translating pain into paint. Although their gestural exuberance and careful control of creamy flesh tones and bolder red accents evoke Cy Twombly’s Mediterranean paintings, in their unapologetic and intense examination of the self they draw closer to Louise Bourgeois’ approach to artmaking as a mode of psychic repair through repetition and reparation. 

 

Audacious, fearless, and deeply moving, Emin’s painting, like her practice more broadly, centralises the self as a means not only of excavating personal trauma, but of giving body to the most fundamentally universal emotional experiences of love, loss, and loneliness. Tender and tactile, there is a yearning to This is life without you - You made me Feel Like This that speaks to both our deep spiritual need for the comforts of physical contact and the persistence of emotional memory. 

 

Inside the exhibition: ‘Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul’, Royal Academy, 2020

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Born in Margate in 1963, Tracey Emin established a name as one of the leading figures of the rebellious YBA movement and garnered attention for her controversial and confessional practice. 
• Executed in 2018, the present work was included in the 2020 Royal Academy pairing of Emin with Edvard Munch, with whom she holds a deep artistic connection. 

 

 

ⁱ Kari J. Brandtzaeg in Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul, exh. cat., Royal Academy, London, 2020, p. 14. 
ⁱⁱ Edith Devaney, quoted in 'Tracey Emin on Edvard Munch In Conversation With Edith Devaney, in Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul, exh. cat., Royal Academy, London, 2020, p. 55. 
ⁱⁱⁱ Kari J. Brandtzaeg, ‘Tracey Emin Meets Edvard Munch. An Essay on Loneliness, Sexuality, and Ageing’, in Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: TheLonliness of the Soul, exh. cat., Royal Academy, London, 2020, p. 16.