Why are the Torso works so important?

The works included in this series are amongst the most emotionally poignant of Emin’s production and speak to Emin’s love for the nude female body, also evident in her Nude Drawings and Nude Self-Portraits. Emin’s interest in the torso, however, has a history of its own. It derives, to the artist’s acknowledgement, from her admiration for the works of Louise Bourgeois.

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How can I sell my Tracey Emin Torsos print?

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Torsos by Tracey Emin Background & Meaning

Torsos

In her Torsos, Emin presents the viewer with headless female nudes, establishing her interest in female sexuality as an experience of both intense desire and embodiment, but also of vulnerability and loss. The prints’ un-idealised palette of blues, dark greens, and blacks, conveys a pervasive sense of loneliness.

Meaning & Analysis

Tracey Emin is an artist who placed at the centre of her art her disarming intimacy, her raw disillusionment about life and her emotional honesty. She is also an artist that speaks of love, loss, loneliness and sex through the use of the naked female body. Her nude torsos best emblematise Emin’s interest in lived female sexuality, and the way it comes to be determined through longing and desire, but also loss and abandonment.

The works included in the Torsos collection present the viewer with the headless torso of a female body. The images are rendered in Emin’s distinctive and instantly recognisable brutal scrawling and her trademark left-handed style. The lines are simple, imprecise, sketchy and rushed. Like in her Nude Drawings and Nude Self-Portraits, the emphasis of the images is on the female form, with every external detail reduced to the minimum, so much so that the figures seem to float on the paper.

What distinguishes these images from Emin’s nude drawings is the heightened focus on female pleasure. It is here perhaps more than in any other series that Emin’s debt to Egon Schiele comes to life. Taking from the Austrian Expressionist painter and his immediately recognisable sexually-provocative female nudes, Emin’s female protagonists are likewise engaged in sexual acts and autoeroticism. However, the tentative, blurred and oftentimes smudged lines of the drawings also endow them with a sense of delicateness, fragility and vulnerability. Her un-idealised palette of blues, dark greens and blacks similarly convey this pervasive sense of loneliness that meddles with the sexual nature of the images. For the artist, her headless torsos are “symbols of lust and loneliness”, and embody the emotional ethos that permeates Emin’s oeuvre.

The works included in this series are amongst the most emotionally poignant of Emin’s production and speak to Emin’s love for the nude female body, also evident in her Nude Drawings and Nude Self-Portraits. Emin’s interest in the torso, however, has a history of its own. It derives, to the artist’s acknowledgement, from her admiration for the works of Louise Bourgeois.
A pioneer of the women’s art movement who engaged with Surrealism as well as the then-developing reconceptualisation of sculpture in the early 1960s, Bourgeois has been an inspiration to many. Her works deal quite explicitly with sex, the female and male nude, motherhood, masochism, violence and death, and were highly informed by the psychoanalytic writings of Melanie Klein. Similarly to Emin’s drawings, many of Bourgeois sketches and watercolours have a distinctively unfinished quality to them. Bourgeois’ explicit depiction of the female body in all of its materiality, her women with full breasts and round buttocks, appealed to Emin and inspired her in her own drawings. Bringing together Egon Schiele with Louise Bourgeois, the nude torsos represent a true testament to Emin’s artistic receptiveness, which makes her works even more art historically relevant.
If you're looking to sell art by Tracey Emin, click the link and we can help. We employ a number of techniques and practices in order to give a realistic and achievable valuation on any art listed on myartbroker.com. We analyse the demand for the work in question, take into consideration previous sales and auction valuations, we assess the current gallery valuation and monitor the current deals taking place via MyArtBroker every day. We regularly advise sellers on a price bracket for their artwork completely free of charge.