A Journey To Death explores the trauma of surgery for the cancer that almost claimed her life. Tracey Emin has been painting, drawing and photographing herself for a long time, but these latest nudes are her grandest and most painfully resonant work yet. Emin has always made art about her physical existence and subjects that had felt unspeakably private, from sexual assault, devastating heartbreak, and ambivalence around motherhood, grief and longing, to adolescent sexuality and menopause. Her work offers companionship for many women going through difficult and painful experiences.

Made in 2021, in these spindly blue-black works she is feeling her way through to a route back into art. Most works in the portfolio express pain, though there is also hope in some instances: the faces of her kittens Pancake and Teacup appear Then I Wasn’t Alone Life Was Here, as emblems of life that will go on. The text also makes its way into her work, as it so often has in the past. “It was inside – always inside,” she writes, the words hovering above her head in Even Saying Nothing is a Lie. It’s a vivid, horrifying expression of a haunted body: the realisation that a hostile presence has manifested within, attacking silently from the inside.

In making herself the subject of her work, and concentrating intensely on figuration, Emin creates bridges with the rich art-historical tradition of the female figure and female nudes. She shows strong emotive force in these pictures, as seen for example in the work of male painters Munch and Schiele, which Emin admires and studied throughout her artistic oeuvre.

“ If I’m not making art, I don’t feel alive. A big part of me will feel dead: I’m not Tracey, I don’t exist. I felt so much better after this work. It’s like, ‘Ah – ah – ah – I’m alive!’ „

—Tracey Emin