In her most recent exhibition at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Tracy Emin presents works created between London and Margate over the past two years.  Through both paintings and works on paper, Emin explores the vulnerabilities surrounding her adversities, demonstrating the transformative and salvific nature of art. Emin invites the viewer to consider their own difficulties, revealing through her evocative title that ultimately, we must save ourselves.

Confronting the complexity of significant life changes, Emin sought to answer one key question through her most recent exhibition at the Galleria Lorcan O’Neill: What does it mean to leave? Leaving is not merely moving from one place to another, as Emin showed through her work, it is a shift in consclection and memory, that iousness, a withdrawal to the intimacy of refexciting sensation of a new beginning.

Inspired by the Expressionist œuvres of the Norwegian Edvard Munch and the Austrian Egon Schiele, Emin's exhibition, comprised of paintings, embroideries, monoprints, and bronzes, explores her complex personal states and ideas of self-representation. Having previosly expressed her own fragility and sexual restlessness with extreme honesty, Emin now offers a radical re-evaluation of the grand tradition of the female nude. 

Having only recently received her CBE and drawing professorship from the Royal Academy of Art, Emin unveiled her fourth exhibition at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill late in 2012. Mature and subdued, yet penetrative and provocative, “You Saved Me” presents viewers with insight into the sheer breadth of Emin’s practice, boasting sculpture, needlework and fluorescent neons among other art forms.

For her third exhibition at the gallery, Emin addresses the themes of death, motherhood, and abortion through a broad range of artistic media. She does so in a way, however, that seems to alter her traditional methods of creative expression. Whilst still graphic and raw, the works of “Why be Afraid” are of a more tender and evocative nature, overall lending the exhibition a more lucid and intimate aspect.