Tracey Emin at Palazzo Strozzi: Between Desire and Vulnerability
From 16 March to 20 July 2025, Palazzo Strozzi in Firenze, Italy, opens its doors to one of the most radical and authentic voices in contemporary international art: Tracey Emin. With 'Sex and Solitude', the most comprehensive exhibition ever dedicated to the artist in Italy, Florence becomes the stage for an intense and visceral exploration of the body, memory, and identity. Curated by Arturo Galansino, the exhibition features over sixty works spanning Emin’s entire career, including paintings, sculptures, installations, and new pieces created specifically for this occasion.
LEFT: Tracey Emin, I waited so Long, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 183.1 × 183.3 × 3.5 cm, Private collection c/o Xavier Hufkens Gallery. © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Foto HV-Studio; RIGHT: Tracey Emin, Thriving on Solitude, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 30.7 x 30.7 x 2.2 cm, JHA COLLECTION, © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025
The Body as a Language
At the core of Tracey Emin’s artistic practice lies the body—not as mere anatomy, but as a repository of experiences, traumas, desires, and fractures. Her fragmented figures, strained postures, blood-stained canvases, and intimate embroideries speak a language that asks for no permission: they assert, reveal, and wound.
Works like “It - didn’t stop - I didn’t stop” (2019) and “There was blood” (2022) demonstrate a powerful balance between figuration and abstraction, where the painterly gesture is not just expressive, but existential. Every bold color, every stroke on the canvas, becomes part of a narrative urgency that cannot be ignored.
LEFT: Tracey Emin, It - didnt stop - I didnt stop, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 152 x 183.5 x 3.7 cm, Bruxelles, Xavier Hufkens Gallery, © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025; RIGHT: Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025
Sexuality and Solitude: Two Interdependent Extremes
The exhibition’s title highlights two key words: sex and solitude—recurring themes in Emin’s work since the very beginning. The artist does not separate intimacy from pain, nor passion from melancholy. Her practice is rooted in personal experiences—relationships, abuse, abortion, illness—yet it transcends the autobiographical to speak to the universal.
Sculptures such as “All I Want Is You” (2016) and neon installations like “Those Who Suffer LOVE” (2009) embody a raw, unfiltered romanticism, where desire becomes a form of resistance and love transforms into a battleground.
LEFT: Tracey Emin, Those who Suffer LOVE, 2009, neon, 57 x 209.3 cm, exhibition copy, Courtesy of the Artist and White Cube. © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Foto © Stephen White. Courtesy White Cube; RIGHT: Tracey Emin, All I want is you, 2016, bronze, 238 x 245 x 233 cm, edition of 3, with 2 Aps, Bruxelles, Xavier Hufkens Gallery, © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025
Matter and Word: Between Painting and Writing
Tracey Emin transforms writing into image and image into voice. Her phrases—etched in neon or stitched onto fabric—are sharp confessions, direct poems, intimate notes. For Emin, written language is an extension of the body and mind, a way of speaking without explaining.
The installation “I do not expect” (2002), a blanket embroidered with fragments of thought, and the monumental “Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made” (1996), reconstructed for this exhibition, are emblematic examples of this tension between the personal and the performative, between the private and the public.
LEFT: Tracey Emin, I do not expect, 2002, appliquéd blanket, 264 x 185 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural, Gifts Program by Geoff Ainsworth AM 2018. © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Foto © Stephen White. Courtesy White Cube; RIGHT: Tracey Emin, Exorcism of the last painting I ever made, 1996, performance / installation, internal dim. 350 x 430 x 430 cm. Courtesy of Schroeder Collection and Faurschou Collection. © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Courtesy White Cube
A Dialogue with Florence and Its Figurative Tradition
Presenting Tracey Emin at Palazzo Strozzi is not merely a curatorial decision—it is a statement rich with meaning. Deeply inspired by Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, Emin positions herself within a European figurative tradition, one that finds in Florence one of its most enduring historical centers.
The monumentality of her bronze sculpture “I Followed You To The End” (2024), placed in the Renaissance courtyard of the Palazzo, establishes a direct dialogue with the architecture and cultural memory of the city. In doing so, Emin confronts and contrasts with classical heritage, bringing the human figure out of myth and into the vulnerability of the present.
LEFT: Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025; RIGHT: Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025
A Radical Practice Between Autobiography and Institution
From the iconic “My Bed” (1998), which brought her to prominence at Tate, to the recent founding of TKE Studios and her artist residency in Margate, Tracey Emin has consistently placed her life at the heart of her art—without ever compromising on themes of violence, illness, grief, or passion.
Now, decades into her career, she is widely recognized as a key figure in contemporary art: “Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy”, “Dame of the British Empire”, and today the focus of a major exhibition in Florence that celebrates the power of turning vulnerability into creative strength.
 LEFT: Tracey Emin, Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025; RIGHT: Tracey Emin, The Decent 2112 HK, 2016, embroidered calico, 163 x 220.8 cm, Private collection c/o Xavier Hufkens Gallery, © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025
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