Tracey Emin catches me looking from her self-portrait to her as I try to assess the closeness of the resemblance. Not that close. This inky screenprint is bigger than she is, its face wider and taller. But it’s not a picture of the outer person but an inner vision. As we stand in front of it I seem to fall into radiating pools of blackness – to cross into darkness.
Emin has curated an exhibition for the depths of winter. It’s a generous, unexpected show with an eclectic yet profound openness to kinds of creativity many might think incompatible: paintings, installations, performance art all face the night here. She sets artists she nurtures at the Emin Studios alongside her heroes Edvard Munch, Louise Bourgeois and other luminaries of modern art – if luminary is the right word in this stygian setting. For, by a stroke of lighting genius, the Carl Freedman Gallery has been plunged into nocturnal shadow that still lets you see the art.
It begins with a concrete waistcoat, like something that might be dredged up encasing a skeleton. The body has gone, leaving holes for arms, legs, neck. It’s by Antony Gormley, cast from himself, and you wonder if he is a bit of a Houdini to have escaped it. Uneasy portraiture dominates this room. Munch gazes like a numbed, ragged pair of claws from his 1895 self-portrait, with a skeletal arm. Joline Kwakkenbos, a resident artists at Emin’s Margate studios, displays three bizarre, striking paintings including Self-Portrait as a Painter as Lucretia, in which she sits in 18th-century costume stabbing herself. It gets doomier. A wailing, stuffed head, malformed and agonised, isolated in a vitrine, is Bourgeois’s answer to Munch’s Scream.
Some artists have answered Emin’s sombre call with blasts of hokey gothic. Lindsey Mendick has made ceramic busts of putrid zombie women whose festering sores and disintegrating flesh look all the more repulsive in shiny glazed pottery. Is this horror or comedy horror? Mendick may not be sure herself. Painter Laura Footes, another graduate of Emin’s studios, is clearly serious in her big allegorical painting of the lords of business and politics seated at a long meeting table with a Dracula castle hovering nearby. It uncomfortably smacks of conspiracy theory but a brilliant detail of a Baconian screaming mouth in a pink flesh-cloud shows her ability.
Next to Footes’s painting is a relic of a performance by Hermann Nitsch, the Vienna actionist who staged outrageous “Orgy-Mystery Theatre” mass happenings at his own castle with lashings of animal blood. It’s a board covered in sketchy lines and real blood from which emerges a skull-faced figure like some Mesoamerican god of death. It’s entitled Design for “Grablegung (Burial)”. Close by, Anselm Kiefer displays a hammer and anvil in a vitrine with Thor written on the glass, a sculpture that shakes with the power of the Norse thunder god.
Myths and monsters, floating castles and vampire orgies – terrors of the dark. But sometimes you see the uncanny in broad daylight. Walking near his Suffolk home at dawn, the photographer Johnnie Shand Kydd captures eerie mists over icy still waters, banks of whiteness shrouding bare trees, clouds looming over wind-raked reeds. These black-and-white pictures hold their own with Kiefer’s mythic vitrines and Georg Baselitz’s 1967 painting Ein Werktätiger, in which a woodcutter with an axe appears to break into pieces before our eyes, as if he’s chopped himself up with his own axe. The final work is by Gilbert & George. Emin tells me it makes her think of the gates of hell. It’s is a picture in which their faces are compressed, twisted into monster masks amid stark winter branches that form a black gate.
Her exhibition, she says, recognises the dark times we are in – you can fill in your own nightmares – but also offers solace from her experience of cancer: “I thought I would die but didn’t.” There is hope in darkness, as stone-age crowds knew when they gathered for the winter solstice at Stonehenge. It is where you have to go to start again. Of course you don’t have to go through what Emin has to know that by entering darkness we discover light. This happens to everyone every 24 hours. You go to bed, put out the light and cross into darkness. When we wake up everything is new. What were those passing phantoms in the night – just dreams and fears?
For this artist they are more real than that. In Emin’s large new painting at the centre of the show, a woman is curled up on her bed. Over her stands a cowled visitant. It looks pretty spooky to me but the artist seemingly sees this ghost as a friend, for the painting is called I Am Protected. Maybe we’re all being watched over until we wake up soon: here’s hoping.
• Crossing into Darkness is at Carl Freeman Gallery, Margate, until 12 April
