inbetween explorations

(The Exhibition “Sex and Solitude” by Tracey Emin, at Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze)

Credits Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.

“Sex and Solitude” is the exhibition presented by Palazzo Strozzi. A journey through the art of Tracey Emin, a major contemporary artist.

The show spans through three decades of her life, with over sixty artworks: past and new paintings, drawings, sewn appliqué, bronze sculptures and neon installations.

Tracey Emin emerged, adventurous, flaring up with her personality, in the mid-1990s among Charles Saatchi’s YBAs (Young British Artists) and became known soon after Saatchi bought her artwork in 1997: “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995” (known as The Tent, destroyed in a fire in 2004), where the names of all those she had shared a bed with – friends, lovers, family, her two unborn children – were stitched on the inside of a tent, seen as a provocative act, it engaged the viewer to think upon their own intimate relations. The artwork was included in the exhibition “Sensation” that attracted huge crowds at the Royal Academy of Arts, alongside the work of artists such as Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst.

Credits Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.

Emin’s earliest works draw from her family, her father was a turkish-cypriot and her mother english with romani origins, but also from her troubled childhood and teenage years in the seaside town of Margate. She was raped when only 13 and left home and school at the age of 15. Years later she achieved an MA at the Royal College of Art.

Credits Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.

In 1996, Emin locked herself naked, in an enclosed room within a gallery in Stockholm for three weeks to explore her sense of guilt. Visitors could look through little eye-lenses into the walls of her studio. Six Years before, she was forced to abandone painting, during her pregnancy, as the smell of oil paint made her feel sick. Posing questions on mortality and the reproductive female body, the work was entitled “Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made”. The collection of artworks became then a single entity. (presently shown at Palazzo Strozzi).

Credits Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.

Two years later, in 1998, the artist exhibited “My Bed”(nominated for the Turner prize and exhibited at the TATE Gallery) a re-presentation of her bed during a time of crisis. It inhabited the scene, whether sitting on a gallery floor or floating up in her paintings, evoked, with it’s presence, the artist’s life passages.

Emin has gone through a diagnosis of cancer and radical surgery in 2020. Since then, unrelented, she has opened her Foundation in Margate ( that supports the TKE Studios, a studio based art school) and produced several exhibits in the most renowned art institutions. In 2024 she was appointed a Damehood by King Charles III and before then a Royal Academician.

Credits Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.

The parable of Dame Tracey Emin speaks to us of many stories. In the past, the artist was patronized by a part of the art establishment and media. However, hers has always been a powerful voice, with open doors, whereby the tales of sexuality and loneliness go side by side.

I met the artist’s works during one of her exhibits, back in London. I clearly remember the sense of a question raised, to which, I couldn’t respond. I left it, within me. Today, in some way, I have recognized myself in it.

In Florence, at Palazzo Strozzi, in “Love Poem for CF” 2007, the nude female figure, reclined, in blurred motion, is perceived in an elusive, fleeting time that feeds the excruciating anticipation. In “Everything is moving, nothing feels safe. You made me feel like this.” 2018, the artist’s self-portrait traced with thin brushstrokes, the body exposed in its carnality, alongside other vigorous strokes that hide and create layers and drips sliding down the canvas. The colors, sometimes harmonious and ethereal, other times exact—blues, blood-reds—lead you into the abstraction of an ecstatic moment, a journey as an act of knowledge. “ I followed you to the end” it’s a giant yet vulnerable bronze sculpture, a mysterious presence in Palazzo Strozzi’s courtyard.

Credits Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.

Emin has long been fascinated by artists such as Egon Schiele, Louise Bourgeois and the Norwegian modernist painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Munch experimented researching a wide array of media and painting techniques, his personal life, the losses, his loved ones were muses that fuelled his artistic inspiration. The painter through his art, has shown the evolving ways of looking at things.

Can Art, in all expressions, elevate beyond ourselves?

It comes to my mind an interview of writer Marguerite Yourcenar, author of –Memoirs of Hadrian-, when asked about poetry, literature, her search for spirituality, she said: “I have a limited interest in myself. I have the impression of being an instrument through which currents, vibrations, have passed, of being nothing more than a crystal that has been traversed.”

Till soon,