Tracey Emin at White Cube Bermondsey review: this thrilling body of work shows the artist is as powerful as ever

Rage. Anguish. Heartache. Adoration. Obsession. Frustration. Love. There are few artists working today more able to translate universal emotions into the realm of the visible; more able to communicate deep feelings, than Tracey Emin. Sincerity can sometimes feel in short supply, but the painter – for that is now what she is, unequivocally, despite the quality of her earlier body of work – embodies it. 

She has no filter (in life either, in my limited but enjoyably unpredictable experience of interacting with her); her canvases are direct expressions of what’s going on in her heart – they are intimately personal, but instantly relatable. 

This major exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey (and it is a big one, extending throughout all of the gallery’s four spaces) comprises some 40 paintings, plus two bronze sculptures – one small, one absolutely massive – and a short film that you should probably avoid if you’re squeamish. 

The body of work, all made this year except one painting from 2023, comes out of a period of what looks very much like furious, anguished disappointment in a lover. Emin’s bold, gestural paintings viscerally evoke all the feelings of despair, fury, sadness, foolishness and defiance that mingle in that moment. 

Tracey Emin Another Place to Live 2024 (Tracey Emin)

The explosion of red in the centre of the bed (the scene of most of the images here, appearing as both comforting cocoon and cage; sometimes coffin) in The End of Love turns it into a bloodbath, the site of intimacy-turned-emotional murder scene. In I Did Nothing Wrong, the lone female nude stands defiant, facing directly out of the canvas – I went into this naked and open, it seems to say; I am not ashamed. What did you do? 

A male figure appears in only a few of the canvases, but his absence is felt in many others, his place in the bed sometimes occupied by one of Emin’s cats (Teacup and Pancake). When he is there, he is often rendered in a disturbingly vivid red, dangerous and set apart despite his physical closeness. 

The work is also, inevitably, infused with the fallout from Emin’s brush with death following her diagnosis of and drastic surgery for bladder cancer in 2020, which left her with a stoma (a permanent opening which allows waste to be collected in a bag). 

Mortality is everywhere. Blood too – it soaks through canvases, seeping through white overpainting, and is the subject of the short film Tears of Blood, in which Emin’s stoma, a surprising pink, like a cheap glacé cherry, merrily trickles it – a daily occurrence that Emin chooses to celebrate as a sign of her clinging to fragile life. If this thrilling body of work is anything to go by, she’s as powerful as ever.