No Substitute For Your Love
No Substitute For Your Love
Signed Print
Tracey Emin
£2,200-£3,300Value Indicator
$4,600-$7,000 Value Indicator
$4,150-$6,000 Value Indicator
¥22,000-¥30,000 Value Indicator
€2,600-€3,850 Value Indicator
$24,000-$35,000 Value Indicator
¥440,000-¥660,000 Value Indicator
$3,000-$4,550 Value Indicator
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47 x 51cm, Edition of 300, Etching
Medium: Etching
Edition size: 300
Year: 2003
Size: H 47cm x W 51cm
Signed: Yes
Format: Signed Print
Last Auction: March 2025
Value Trend:
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Meaning & Analysis
British artist Tracey Emin’s No Substitute For Your Love from 2003 is a delicate soft-ground etching on Hahnemülle paper. It was inspired by German painter Hans Holbein's Portrait of a Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling. The work was executed as part of a signed and limited edition of 300.
Emin was born in south London in 1963, into the thick of a blooming technicolour age referred to as ‘The Swinging Sixties’. The period marked the beginning of a youth-driven cultural revolution, besides marking the birth of third-wave feminism.
Emin’s drawings, which lie at the heart of her most vulnerable artistic creations, are filled with allegories and manifest how outstanding of a draughtswoman she really is. She is an expressionist whose jagged lines convey her pure emotion, technical proficiency and genuine interest in her craft. These drawings are fierce, devoted and exquisitely constructed. There is a surprising playfulness lurking beneath even the most complex subject matter, as her art finds intellectual and cultural validation for her curious existential state.
Emin’s No Substitute for Your Love from 2003 was inspired by German painter and portraitist Hans Holbein's Portrait of a Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling from the late 1520s. The artist exchanges the painter’s Northern Renaissance style for her typically scratchy and hesitant lines. Moreover, Emin removes the human element, transforming her illustration into a nature study showcasing only the faint imprint of a squirrel surrounded by acorn branches. In her interpretation of a classic, Emin’s drawing functions as a memento of absent love.
Tracey Emin, born in 1963, stands as a fearless provocateur in the contemporary art scene. A trailblazer of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement in the late 1980s, the artist has sparked conversation and controversy for decades. Confronting themes of love, trauma and femininity with great vulnerability, Emin's work is a visceral tapestry of her life and has forged an intimate dialogue between artist and audience. In 1999, this raw approach to storytelling won her a nomination to the Turner Prize and, in 2007, it got her a coveted spot as a Royal Academician at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA).
