Tracey Emin

My Photo Album is a journey through the life of British artist Tracey Emin using photographs from her personal collection. Edited from the albums she has kept from an early age, this visual autobiography contains some amazing images: Tracey sharing a pram as a baby with her twin Paul, her bus-pass photo aged 14, a ‘glamour’ shoot as a semi-naked art student, her early successes as an artist, through to hanging out with superstars such as David Bowie and Ronnie Wood. Perhaps more than any other artist working today, Tracey Emin’s work is grounded in the personal experiences and events of her life. In these poignant photographs we can examine this crossover: the moments that have shaped her, and influenced her work: from her family life to the pivotal Young British Artist movement of the 1990s. The design of the book resembles a photo album, with Tracey’s handwritten captions and notes accompanying the photographs. Virtually all of the 283 images have never been published before. Taken on 35mm film, they have an intimate, visceral quality. By turns tender and extrovert, they simultaneously document both the blossoming of an artist and a unique period in art history, from Emin’s singular viewpoint.

Regarded as one of the world’s leading contemporary artists, Tracey Emin (born 1963) has gained international acclaim for her blunt, personal and revealing style, which elicits a broad spectrum of emotions ranging from shock to empathy to self-reflection. Drawing on personal experience, Emin often reveals painful situations with brutal honesty and poetic humor. I Followed You to the Sun features a very personal collection of works titled the Lonely Chair drawings, which are published here for the first time. In this series of self-portraits, Emin depicts a solitary female in her signature gestural style. The images are drawn from photographs that Emin took of herself and convey poignant emotions of longing and sadness. Emin’s musings on love and loneliness are interspersed throughout the book and further illustrate the subconscious nature of the drawings. This artist’s book is published on the occasion of Emin’s exhibitions at both of Lehmann Maupin’s New York locations.

Since she first emerged in the early 1990s as a member of a generation later tagged “the Young British Artists,” Tracey Emin (born 1963) has made art that takes as its starting point the most harrowing and intimate details of her personal history. Published for a major exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want brings together suites of works from across the artist's career, spotlighting her achievements in a wide variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, painting, text-based works, photographs, video and performance. Sometimes confrontational or sexually provocative, Emin's art resonates with the “personal is political” legacy of feminist art, while simultaneously speaking to relationships in general, as well as exploring spirituality, cultural identity, class and celebrity. Disarmingly frank and often deeply confessional, Emin's art is also animated by her playful and ironic wit, as this new survey monograph indicates.