FLORENCE.- Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence presents Tracey Emin. Sex and Solitude, the first major institutional exhibition in Italy dedicated to one of the most celebrated British contemporary artists.
Curated by Arturo Galansino, Director General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, this exhibition delves into Emin’s varied work, encompassing paintings, drawings, film, photography, embroidery, appliqué, sculptures, and neon installations. The titular themes of sex and solitude underpin over 60 works on display, that span from different moments of her career, taking visitors on an intensely personal yet universally resonant journey that reflects deeply on the themes of the body and desire.
Several artworks on view at Palazzo Strozzi are being shown in Italy for the first time, including the new monumental bronze sculpture I Followed You to the End (2024), installed in the Palazzo's Renaissance courtyard, and the seminal installation Exorcism of the last painting I ever made (1996). Furthermore, selected artworks have been specifically produced on the occasion of the exhibition.
Emin is renowned for her candid, confessional approach to art, transforming personal experiences into deeply intimate, vulnerable and powerful works. Rather than depicting precise events literally, Emin conveys the raw emotions they evoke as well as the physical reactions they elicit, from sexual passion to love, from anguish to melancholy.
Within the exhibition, paintings such as It - didnt stop - I didnt stop (2019) or There was blood (2022) embody these expressive forces, straddling figuration and abstraction through gestural mark-making and the use of bold colours. Her sculptures, meanwhile, translate this emotional charge into three- dimensional form, capturing the vulnerability and strength of the human body through their materiality, scale and dynamism, as in All I want is you (2016) that expresses a close sense of intimacy and introspection. Emin’s text-based pieces function similarly, using direct, explicit language to engage viewers on a visceral level, such us in neon works like Those who suffer love (2009) or in embroidery or appliquéd blanket pieces such as I do not expect (2002).
Life and art are inseparable in her creative process, leading her to create works where personal stories transform into existential metaphors. Through her honest and autobiographical expression, Emin focuses on themes of the body and figuration, situating herself within a distinct lineage in art history alongside artists like Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, two of her primary influences. Her exploration of the body and raw emotions aligns her with a long-standing artistic tradition centered on the human figure, creating a resonance that both contrasts with and converges upon Florence’s Renaissance heritage, embodied by Palazzo Strozzi itself.
Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin DBE RA was born in 1963 in Croydon, London, and grew up in the seaside town of Margate. Her work spans drawings, paintings, tapestries, embroidery, film, bronze sculptures, and neon signs. The artist draws on her own life to inform her work, referencing deeply intimate experiences from her sexual history, abuse, and abortion to gender, relationships, and, most recently, her cancer and disability.
In 1999 she attracted huge publicity when she was nominated for the Turner Prize and exhibited My Bed at Tate Gallery, London. The work, which had been made the year before as the result of a period of severe emotional flux, features the artist’s own unmade bed surrounded by personal items and other detritus, such as condoms, blood-stained underwear, empty bottles of alcohol, cigarette buds.
From there, Emin's career continued to grow: in 2007 she represented the United Kingdom at the 52nd Venice Biennale, in 2011 she was made the Royal Academy's Professor of Drawing, one of the first two female professors in the history of the institution.
Today Emin enjoys full institutional recognition. She has recently opened the Tracey Karima Emin (TKE) Studios in Margate, a professional artist’s studios entirely subsidized by her, with an additional free, studio-based, art school programme called Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR). In 2024, she was honoured with a Damehood in the King’s Birthday Honours for her services to art.
The Exhibition
The exhibition consists of over sixty works from public and private collections around the world, displayed across the Piano Nobile and the public spaces of the courtyard and façade of Palazzo Strozzi. The thematic path explores different aspects and moments of the artist's career through various media such as painting, sculpture, installation, and video, using diverse techniques and materials like embroidery, bronze, and neon.
A large neon sign on the façade of Palazzo Strozzi welcomes visitors with the powerful visual declaration that gives the exhibition its title: Sex and Solitude (2025), a site-specific work created for the show, illuminating the Renaissance architecture in vivid blue. This intervention immediately introduces two poles of Tracey Emin's exploration: the body and sexuality on one hand, solitude and vulnerability on the other. The body, fragile and carnal, is always at the center of her inquiry, suspended between desire and suffering, love and loss, as exemplified by the work exhibited in the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi, I Followed You To The End (2024), a monumental bronze sculpture of a female figure that dominates the space, evoking a strong tension between monumentality and intimacy.
The reclamation of the female body emerges in numerous works throughout the exhibition, including Exorcism of the last painting I ever made (1996), an installation presented for the first time in Italy, which documents the historic performance that marked Emin’s return to painting after years of interruption. In one of Palazzo Strozzi’s rooms, the temporary studio where the artist lived and worked for three and a half weeks in front of the public is reconstructed, showcasing drawings and paintings inspired by male artists such as Egon Schiele, Yves Klein, and Pablo Picasso. Becoming both the subject and object of her art, Emin performs a kind of artistic exorcism, subverting the role of women: no longer mere models, but active protagonists.
At the heart of the exhibition, painting serves as a central expressive medium for Emin, with each canvas creating a field of emotional tensions marked by a strong materiality, as seen in works like Hurt Heart (2015), It was all too Much (2018), It – didn’t stop – I didn’t stop (2019), There was blood (2022), Not Fuckable (2024), and I waited so Long (2022), where the artist works instinctively, allowing forms to emerge, teetering between figuration and abstraction. The layers of color and marks left by the painting gesture retain the traces of the creative process, with visible erasures and revisions. Rapid brushstrokes and paint drips imbue the canvas with a vibrant, unstable intensity, amplifying the passionate character of the works while conveying feelings of fragility and suspended memory.
Love is a central theme in Tracey Emin's work, explored in its facets of desire, romance, and pain, as seen in embroideries like I don’t need to see you I can feel you! (2016) and No Distance (2016). A similar intensity permeates her bronze sculptures with silver nitrate patina, such as Coming Down From Love (2024) and In my defence – I thought of only you (2017). Language plays a fundamental role in Emin’s practice, both in titles and within the works themselves. The words she uses are always direct and explicit, aiming to viscerally engage the audience, blending confession and assertion. Emin’s famous use of neon, with which she creates phrases in her own handwriting, transforms intimate expression into a visual and emotional experience. Examples include the large neon sign on the façade of Palazzo Strozzi, as well as works like Love Poem for CF (2007), based on verses written in the 1990s for her ex-boyfriend Carl Freedman, which transforms into a universal declaration of pain and desire, or Those who Suffer LOVE (2009), in dialogue with a video of the same title in the exhibition space.
“Contemporary art is an integral part of Palazzo Strozzi’s identity, and we are proud to present Tracey Emin’s work in a major exhibition, unprecedented in Italy, allowing the public to discover one of the most famous and influential artists in the contemporary art scene,” says Arturo Galansino, Director General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and curator of the exhibition. “The exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi is not a retrospective but follows a thematic path, offering the audience an immersion in the conflicting emotions that drive Tracey Emin’s art. Sex and solitude, the opposite poles evoked by the title, represent the core of her artistic practice, an intimate dialogue between the desire for connection and the inevitable isolation of existence.”
