I Loved My Innocence

Born in Croydon, south London, British artist Tracey Emin was brought up in Margate, on the coast of Kent. Her parents never married as her father had a whole other separate and legally binding family elsewhere.

The artist’s work takes refuge in her art to deal with past and present obstacles, exploring the twists and turns of Emin’s personal life. Stylistically, the primary source of inspiration for the artist’s Childhood grouping are expressionist masters Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele. Their legacies offer an attractive element of catharsis for the intimate and confrontational nature of Emin’s creations. This collection of artworks has utilised two methods that command the strongest associations of domesticity and the feminine; the drawn and the embroidered.

I Love My Innocence of 2019 is a delicate lithograph that articulates themes of physical and emotional change. The work reflects on the simultaneous joy and suffering that is intrinsic to human existence. Through her honest and energetic lines, Emin powerfully inscribes her sketched composition with ambiguous emotion and memory. Portraying her own naked body, the illustration envelops feelings of naivety, betrayal and recovery, neatly packaged within the gestural conventions of figuration. Emin in this work also connects with a vast art historical legacy of modernist angst and the heightened sexuality of the female form.