For over three decades, Tracey Emin has operated at the very limits of confessional art, pulling the most intimate, traumatic, and unsanitized details of her private world into the blinding light of the gallery floor. From the infamous, unmade chaos of My Bed (1998) to the sprawling, neon-lit declarations of heartbreak and defiance, Emin’s practice has always been fundamentally biographical. However, nothing in her early career, synonymous with the provocative zenith of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement, could have entirely anticipated the profound, visceral transformation of her recent work. The shift was not born of artistic restlessness, but of biological necessity. Following a devastating diagnosis of aggressive bladder cancer in 2020, Emin was forced into a confrontation with mortality that permanently altered both her anatomy and her creative philosophy. Today, she speaks openly of occupying a “second life.” It is a life stripped of pretence, defined by the brutality of survival, and characterised by an artistic output of blistering, unprecedented urgency.
The Brutality of Survival
The physical toll of Emin’s illness cannot be overstated, nor can it be separated from the art she now produces. In the spring of 2020, the artist underwent major, life-saving surgery that involved the total removal of her bladder, her womb, and sections of her intestine. She emerged from the operating theatre alive, but irrevocably changed, now living with a stoma bag and facing a gruelling, protracted recovery. For an artist whose entire oeuvre has been predicated on the documentation and exposure of the female body—specifically, her own body—this anatomical reconfiguration presented a profound crisis, and ultimately, a powerful new artistic vernacular.
Rather than retreating into privacy, Emin leaned into the discomfort with characteristic ferocity. She has historically refused to compartmentalise private pain from public viewing, and her cancer journey has proven no exception. The “broken body” is no longer a metaphor in her work; it is the central, literal subject. Her recent paintings, drawings, and sculptures document the scarring, the stoma, and the raw, physical reality of a body that has been dismantled and sutured back together. In doing so, she strips away the polite euphemisms that typically surround severe illness. There is no neat, inspiring narrative of battling and triumphing; there is only the messy, bloody, and painful reality of enduring. This unflinching documentation has forced the art world to confront the realities of disability, chronic illness, and physical trauma in a space that too often prioritises aesthetic perfection or intellectual detachment.
A Tate Modern Benchmark: “A Second Life”
This period of intense physical and emotional reckoning has culminated in Tracey Emin: A Second Life, the monumental retrospective currently dominating the Tate Modern. Running from 27 February to 31 August 2026, the exhibition is the most comprehensive survey of her career to date, spanning over forty years of her practice. Yet, it is the tension between her early, iconic pieces and her new, post-surgery creations that provides the exhibition with its electric, unsettling power.
Visitors navigating the vast galleries of the Tate are confronted with career-defining installations like My Bed (1998) and Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996) standing in direct dialogue with entirely new, previously unseen works. Among these is the striking bronze sculpture Ascension (2024), a piece that directly addresses her altered form and the complex relationship she now maintains with her own physical boundaries. The exhibition is an exhausting, exhilarating journey through love, grief, violence against women, and ultimate survival.
Reflecting on the scale and significance of this 2026 retrospective, Emin noted the profound personal weight of the curation. “I feel this show, titled ‘A Second Life’, will be a benchmark for me,” she explained to the press. “A moment in my life when I look back and go forward. A true celebration of living.” It is this tension—the backward glance at the trauma of the past and the forward momentum of a celebrated survival—that elevates the Tate show from a mere historical survey to a living, breathing testament to contemporary British art.
The Margate Renaissance and the Engine of TKE Studios
While the Tate Modern retrospective cements her institutional legacy in London, the true engine of Emin’s second life is situated on the Kent coast. Her return to Margate, the seaside town of her turbulent youth, has proven to be a masterstroke of both personal healing and cultural regeneration. Margate is no longer just the backdrop to her early trauma; it is the active site of her contemporary empowerment.
Here, she established TKE Studios (Tracey Emin Artist Residency), transforming a sprawling former bathhouse and mortuary into a vibrant hub for artistic production. The initiative is a deliberate, philanthropic effort to foster a new generation of artists, providing them with affordable studio space and rigorous professional development in an era when such resources are increasingly scarce. By anchoring her practice in Margate, she has inextricably linked her own recovery with the town’s ongoing cultural resilience.
Emin’s influence in the region extends beyond bricks and mortar. Earlier this year, she curated the group exhibition Crossing Into Darkness at the Carl Freedman Gallery in Margate, running from 18 January to 12 April 2026. The show provided a platform for emerging voices while exploring the same thematic terrain—trauma, the descent into the unknown, and the painful crawl back into the light—that defines her current practice. Margate, therefore, serves a dual purpose: it is the sanctuary where she physically rebuilds her strength, and the community she is actively enriching with her legacy.
The Monumental and the Intimate
Emin’s resurgence is not confined to the United Kingdom. Her “second life” has sparked renewed international interest, proving that the deeply specific, personal nature of her trauma possesses a universal, human resonance. As her Tate retrospective commands attention in London, the broader scope of her sculptural work is simultaneously being celebrated with the installation of her monumental 2017 bronze, The Mother, at White Cube Bermondsey. Furthermore, the momentum of 2026 will carry her straight into Scandinavia, with a major solo exhibition scheduled to open at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen from 7 October 2026 to 28 February 2027.
The global demand for her work underscores a vital truth about her evolution. Where her early YBA contemporaries have sometimes struggled to mature past the shock tactics of the 1990s, Emin has allowed life—in all its brutal, unpredictable severity—to deepen her practice. The shock of an unmade bed has been replaced by the far more profound shock of a body split open and sewn back together to cheat death.
The Unapologetic Continuity of Self
There is a temptation to view Tracey Emin’s current era as a complete reinvention, a shedding of the provocative skin that made her famous. But to do so is to misunderstand the fundamental continuity of her life’s work. The woman who embroidered the names of everyone she had ever slept with inside a tent is the exact same woman who now paints the realities of her stoma bag. The medium and the specific nature of the vulnerability have shifted, but the underlying methodology—total, uncompromising, often uncomfortable honesty—remains fiercely intact.
Her second life is not an apology for her first. It is, rather, a profound distillation of it. Stripped of the protective layers of youth and forced to navigate the precarious edge of her own mortality, Emin has achieved a state of artistic clarity that is rare and formidable. She has transitioned from the enfant terrible of British art to its most enduring, physically grounded elder stateswoman. In forcing us to look at the fragility of the human body, she has created her most indestructible body of work.