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Tracey Emin will open her biggest ever exhibition at the Tate Modern next spring, showcasing her best artworks from a 40-year career.
A Second Life will include some of Emin’s most famous works, including the headline-grabbing and Turner prize-nominated My Bed, from 1998, alongside never-before-seen pieces.
“I’m very excited about having a show at Tate Modern,” Emin said. “For me it’s one of the greatest international contemporary art museums in the world and it’s here in London. I feel this show … will be a benchmark for me. A moment in my life when I look back and go forward. A true celebration of living.”
Emin, most famous for Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (The Tent) and My Bed, has opened her own art school and embarked on a new body of work since she was diagnosed with aggressive bladder cancer five years ago.
The exhibition will chart Emin’s work from her “first life” through to her second, post-illness and surgery. The confessional visual artist has spoken candidly about surviving cancer, the surgery she underwent and how she now has a stoma (an opening in her abdomen) and relies on a urostomy bag to collect her urine.
“I am really happy that I didn’t die and I am around to see this exhibition,” Emin said earlier this year. “I was there at the opening of the Tate Modern in 2000 – and at the time it felt like the most exciting thing that could ever possibly happen to London. You judge a city by its art,” she added in celebration of the gallery’s 25th birthday.
The survey exhibition will bring together more than 90 works including painting, video, textile, neon, sculpture and installation, demonstrating Emin’s “uncompromising confessional approach to sharing experiences of love, trauma and personal growth”.
The Tate Modern said: “Emin’s commitment to unapologetic self-expression has transformed our understanding of what art can be and continues to influence contemporary art today, using the female body to explore passion, pain and healing.
“Spanning her extraordinary 40-year practice – from seminal installations made in the 1990s, to recent paintings and bronzes going on display for the first time – A Second Life marks the most significant exhibition of Emin’s career, tracing the key life events that have shaped her journey and transformation.”
The exhibition will begin by presenting works from Emin’s first solo exhibition at White Cube with a series of tiny photographs of her art school paintings from the 1980s which she destroyed following a difficult period of her life. It will include the documentary Why I Never Became a Dancer about her teenage years in Margate and other works centred around the seaside town where Emin now offers rent-free space to art students.
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The exhibition will also address Emin’s experiences of sexual assault and abortion. Shown publicly for the first time, the 2002 quilt The Last of the Gold is emblazoned with an “A to Z of abortion”, providing advice for women facing similar situations, the Tate Modern said.
Two seminal installations – Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made and My Bed – will also feature before the exhibition explores Emin’s experience of cancer, surgery and disability with the 2024 bronze sculpture Ascension and stills from a new documentary showing the stoma that she lives with.
Emin, who was given a damehood in the king’s birthday honours list last year for her services to art, is one of Britain’s most acclaimed artists, a member of the Young British Artists movement of the 1980s, a Turner prize nominee, and a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.
Tracey Emin: A Second Life is on at the Tate Modern, London, 26 February to 30 August 2026
