‘I just started painting and painting and painting and painting,’ says Tracey Emin, who has spent the last few years exploring the medium in a series of works now exhibiting at White Cube Bermondsey in London. ‘I was quite angry about something – very angry, actually. I started writing over the paintings, and I never know what I'm going to write. It's just automatic. The words “I followed you to the end” came out. I was thinking about when you really believe in something or someone, and you will do anything for them, you will follow them to the complete end, and that's what I felt I'd done. And by following something or someone to the end, I realised it was the end, because I knew where the end was.’
The exhibition, taking its title from this moment of explicit awareness, traces Emin’s journey through loss. Teetering on the precipice of life and death, works consider the finality of emotion hand-in-hand with references to her recent personal exposure to the void. After a diagnosis of aggressive bladder cancer in 2020, Emin underwent major surgery that saw the removal of the affected, and surrounding, organs.
