Home People Exhibitions Venues Images About

Tracey Emin

Born, 1963 in Croydon, UK

Tracey Emin was one of the artists included in Brilliant!: New Art From London, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, 22 October 1995 - 7 January 1996 and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 17 February - 14 April 1996. Emin received a BFA from Maidstone College of Art, Kent, and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London. The exhibition was one of a number that featured practitioners identified with the so-called yBa grouping. The term yBa refers to certain types of practitioners who collectively, and in some instances, rather loosely, came to be known as Young British Artists, or yBas for short. The term originated in the early 1990s, centred on the work of Damien Hirst and a number of other artists. In an essay The Tate, The Turner Prize and the Art World, Louisa Buck offered a useful summary of the term’s origins. “[Charles] Saatchi had attended [Damien] Hirst’s famous Freeze exhibition in 1988, and soon began to bulk-buy this new batch of home-grown talent. He also set about applying his marketing skills to the promotion of these artists and their work, initially in a series of widely publicised exhibitions at Boundary Road [the original home of the Saatchi Gallery, in St John’s Wood, London] during 1992-5 under the collective title of Young British Artists. The acronym stuck, and soon any artist of that generation, whether or not they had been to Goldsmiths [College], was branded YBA.” Louisa Buck, The Tate, the Turner Prize and the Art World, in The Turner Prize and British Art, Tate, 2007, pp. 12 – 25 (p.19). Chris Ofili was the only Black artist included in Brilliant!: New Art From London. This was at a time when Ofili’s distinctive use of elephant dung within his work was very much in its ascendancy and his Turner Prize nomination was still several years off.

GQ Magazine, December 1996, Great British Issue, was a celebration of Cool Britannia. The issue included a feature on Art, trailed on the contents page as Britain’s young masters, and written by Louisa Buck. The first of the five artists featured, deemed to be most reflective of Cool Britannia, was Chris Ofili and to this end, a full page portrait of the artist opened the piece. The other artists featured were Simon Bill, Tracey Emin, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Gary Hume. Works in Progress. Put yourself in the picture with Louisa Buck’s portraits of five British artists with the talent to take on the modern world. GQ Magazine, December 1996, pp. 86 – 90.

Along with Steve McQueen, Steven Pippin, and Jane and Louise Wilson, Tracey Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize 1999, for “her solo exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin, New York, and Sagach Exhibition Space, Tokyo, in which she exhibited works that showed a continuing vibrancy and flair for self-expression, a frank and often brutal honesty, and her versatility across a range of media.” The Turner Prize of that year was awarded to Steve McQueen, “for his exhibitions at the Institute of Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and Kunsthalle, Zürich, which documented his original and uncompromising approach to film installations, including a major new piece, Drumroll, and his innovative presentation of work in other media.” McQueen was only the second Black British artist to win the Turner Prize. The first, Chris Ofili, was the previous year’s winner.

Both the above quotes come from the introduction to the Turner Prize catalogue, which also contained introductions - both written and visual - to these artists’ work.