Tracey Emin’s second solo show at White Cube New York “Lovers Grave” presents a series of paintings inspired by the artist’s recent bout with terminal cancer.  

Emin, who has a history of employing a variety of media, is known for making in-your-face work dealing with personal tropes that don’t shy away from confrontation. Working here in painterly abstraction, Emin’s approach appears no different. In her formative years, Emin was influenced by painters such as Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch; artists known for their contorted and gruesome figures. In Lovers Grave, having dealt first-hand with the existential and physical realities of cancer, Emin appears to carry this torch further than either of the former could imagine. In this show of intimately personal paintings, Emin interrogates love and loss, and their meaning after staring at mortality in the mirror 

Oscillating between reds, pinks, blacks, and blues, her approach could be initially compared to abstract expressionism. However, for bringing visual form to the hues of the pains of human flesh, the term bodily abstraction might be more appropriate.     

In the painting The Beginning and The End of Everything 2023, for example, a haunting dark figure embraces another traced in acrylic red paint, appearing to lay the other down to rest. The contrast between the ghostly figure and the red female brings focus to the difference between life in its vitality—represented through dripping red—and the unknown threat of death lurking in the corner. 

In There Was Blood (2022) a similar disquiet scene is presented, where two passionate figures drawn in black and joined in intimacy are in a bed. They are surrounded by sharp tones of red and pyrrol crimson. These, again, drip down the canvas like the vital elixir of blood.  

In There was no Right Way (2022) a contorted, Schielian female figure lies down on her back, bathing in a sea of white. Two mountain-shaped forms appear in the background.  The scene could refer to Emin’s seaside hometown in Margate, perhaps from an earlier memory, or a scene foreshadowing one to come.  

In We died Again (2023), instead of the predominant red tones seen in most of the work here, a contrast appears. Two figures, outlined in dark shades of navy blue encounter each other. Between them, a sort of light blue energy radiates between their chests. This work evokes a different emotion compared to the other paintings. Rather than the vitality of blood, it’s a release that comes at the end of a relationship. Or, maybe it is the signal of a rebirth.

While Emin’s work in this show continuously slips between ephemerality and loss, the remaining message emphasizes a display of resurrection forthright. Is it loss or is it a love that pulls one out of the grave, as expressed in the artist’s words, “like a phoenix rising from the ashes”?

—Lyssa Sartori

All images copyright the artist & courtesy White Cube Gallery, New York