A second life Tracey Emin: A Second Life, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk

This letter is a translation of the German original

For long years of our lives we have, have, have the feeling of being masters of our fate. Of holding our life in our hands. Life, all the worlds that open up, the wonders, the abysses and the prospects, the encounters and the losses, the hopes, exertions, gratifications, all the running and wanting and needing and holding on, the taking and penetrating and holding, the risking, amassing and searching, the smoking and snorting and grafting and slogging and boozing so as to pass out and be able to come round again, all this fucking and clinging and craving, the breeding and deluding disillusioning ourselves destroying ourselves, the learning and the eternal trying to love, all this wanting and grabbing and gorging, hurting and bleeding and puking and laughing and bawling snot and tears bawling because the world is too small and too bad for life and because it will not bend to life and to what life owes us.

To master life, as the fine phrase goes, to subjugate the imponderables with money and power and violence (quieter and louder) and where they will not be subjugated to go over to faith, which is nothing other than the subjugation of life by foul means, simply to whitewash all that shit with gold leaf but that is not the done thing.

Then you, the great master of your fate, suddenly step out in front of a car, fail to see the train. Suddenly cells derail and start proliferating in the most impossible places. The heart is crushed by its furred-up crown, the blood clots somewhere in the thigh and the bullet shoots synapses apart in the brain or one lung clean off.

You are not old yet, a bare or a good half-century, that is nothing, there are people who live to be almost a hundred, and suddenly, suddenly, in a single moment everything breaks down and breaks apart, suddenly you realise, if if if the grace of consciousness is granted you in that moment, that you are no master over life and never were one, only a worm on a thread, a naked fish wriggling on the hook, and meanwhile the grill is glowing. And if if if now, in the instant of your first death, clarity is given you and above all complete annihilation is spared you, which is improbably improbable, if, that is, the car only crushes a few organs and breaks the spine but not the neck, if the train grazes you and leaves one half of you alive, if the proliferating cells can be peeled out all together from deep inside you, surrender to the photon bombardment and bow to the chemical poisoning, if the heart can be hauled back into life by high-voltage current of superhuman force and its crown, set right with implants, lets blood pass through again, who knows for how much longer hours days weeks a few years, if, that is, this luck, this compounded chance, this most improbable of things comes to pass and you, none of this has anything to do with you or your merit, let alone your wishes, if, that is, you are now given a little a little a little more time, then, yes, then you have a chance of a second life. A second life.

Tracey Emin at Tate Modern, London

It was the first time I had wept at an art exhibition¹. In front of the ensemble of four pictures in watercolour and ink on paper, with a medicine bottle and a hospital wristband and a letter, the woman standing beside me, reading the lines at the same moment as I was, burst into tears: My Abortion². The woman was something like a medium between that letter and me, it was her tears that set mine flowing: May 1990 / When I came round in the recovery room / I was crying and in Pain / I couldnt believe what I had done, I / had killed the thing whitch I could love most / "Forgive me tiny little thing / Your Soul is Free / Forgive me - leave me (...) There had been twins. Only one had been aborted. The second foetus slipped out of Tracey a few days later in a London taxi and she held the dead one between hand and thigh. It is hard to bear, as a visitor, just as it is hard to reel through all the often self-destructive stories that deal you heavy blows picture by picture video by video letter by letter text by text. Sex, rape, drugs, blood and abandonment. In the nineties Tracey Emin's art was described, or decried, as confessional art and as exhibitionism³, but those are mere labels with which people believe they can lock a universe into a single word and put it on their shelf.

A breathless search is visible through all her pictures and installations from her first life: the famous bed⁴, by now almost the emblem of an era and of Young British Art, Its not me Thats / Crying / Its my Soul⁵, her inscribed wall hangings AT THE AGE OF 13 WHY THE HELL SHOULD I TRUST ANYONE / NO FUCKING WAY. NO / I SAID NO⁶, the blood-red and death-black acts of sex, the never-ending copulation painted across from the second life into the first You Keep Fucking Me You Keep Fucking ME You KEEP FUCKING ME You KEEP FUCKING ME (...)⁷, and none of this is particularly shocking or provocative or a confession or anything, it is simply the torture of perfectly ordinary life, our endless, senseless, unappeasable hunger to be touched, for love and its derivatives, for ecstatic oblivion. I have the feeling of having come home at last. I breathe again and am grateful for her unsparing opening up, for what else is art but: opening up? Show your wound was the title Joseph Beuys gave an installation in Munich's Kunstforum⁸, yes, here, I suppose, is the key that now makes this homecoming possible for me and unlocks the door to my own dwelling. Show your wound, because you must reveal the sickness you want to heal.⁹

Reeling

Yes, reeling is the right word for my mode of locomotion through this exhibition, through this home in which every corner seems familiar to me, familiar, with a different face, to be sure, and perhaps a different sex, but it is me. Mind you, I do not seem to be the only one reeling. The other visitors' steps are unsteady too, they turn awkwardly towards needlework full of words ...SHE PICKED UP HER FAVORITE ART DECO VARSE RAN ACROSS THE ROOM - AND SMASHED IT ACROSS MY HEAD - SCREAMING IVE got TO GET AWAY FROM YOU - (...)¹⁰, cling to the huge wall hanging IN TURKEY WE SAY WHEN YOU LEARN TO LOVE A ROSE YOU LEARN TO LOVE THE THOWNS¹¹ stumble, and and then stammer something incoherent in front of the wide-open thighs of a woman presenting her bushy sex, but why why why You made me Feel like nothing¹²?, and only now do I grasp that this reeling is Tracey's, who is simply passing this whole heavenandhell of her first life, all the screams, laughs, spatters, tears, moanings, losses and abuses, on to me with all her strength, handing it on, shoving it through so to speak.

The Turn

Then something shifts. The worst is there to be seen. Blood, wounds, dripping swabs, cuts, bloody nipples that turn out to be fresh openings, protrusions. A self-portrait with two bags on her belly¹³, small pictures with countless tubes in the arm and bloody towels on the floor. Squamous cell carcinoma of the bladder: diagnosis in the first COVID lockdown in the spring of 2020, prognosis without surgery: not even six months left. In July 2020: a seven-and-a-half-hour operation by a team of twelve surgeons. April 2021: the cancer beaten, she can go on living with considerable disabilities.¹⁴

A Second Life

The second life. The gift of a life. The life that no longer needs anything but art. All the pressure, all the hopes and prospects, all the wanting and grabbing and gorging, hurting and bleeding and puking and laughing and bawling snot and tears bawling because the world will not bend to life, have evaporated, were surgically removed, driven out with high-voltage current and bombed to bits with proton beams. Now you are just glad so glad to be alive at all and you grasp that there is nothing whatsoever to want or to demand and that the world need not bend to anything at all and least of all to your small insignificant existence, and that you can only be grateful for this new moment a gift not owed God forbid! only a gift almost only a loan and that the train rushing past has at least left you the one half for a second life after the first.

The outlines of a naked woman standing, a picture of a candour and clarity never seen before. The face smudged, because remembering needs no face and no search but the clear gaze inwards into the interior the gaze at the things that are always waiting for us but for which we are still still still not ready and never were ready and never will be ready until we are ready then when when when if the day ever comes. I Did Nothing Wrong¹⁵, but still the guilty conscience. The dead, naked, red Tracey on a table, standing beside her the black figure, head slightly inclined towards the other. I watched Myself die and come alive¹⁶. Now she can contemplate her first life, all that striving and searching and suffering and hoping that she was, still is, and also no longer is, for now she is also the second one, who can look, back but also forward, and hope that it goes on clearing, her gaze.

To the End

Black female figure against a blood-red background, her lower body dissolving into words that fall to form a wide skirt You Made me Like this ALL OF You - You - / You men That I so Insanely Loved so much / You Are The ones That Made Me Feel So AL-ONE / ALL of You - Each of You In your own individual way / I - I - I was At Fault to Keep Loving you / Like a Fool I Followed Love - to The end / Like The Sad haunted Soul That I am / I FOLLOWED YOU to / THE END That is true yes true of course but it is also true that all these men exist only in her, all these women only in me. And that she was not wrong to love them. The stupidity of our first life is not that we follow love to the end, but that we fool ourselves that our clinging and screaming and hitting and fucking has anything to do with love or that any other people bear any responsibility for our love or are even love itself. I Followed you to the end¹⁷ Dear heart, just stay at home! All the loneliness that leaps out at us from the copulation scenes of the first life You Keep Fucking Me You Keep Fucking ME You KEEP FUCKING ME You KEEP FUCKING ME (...) has nothing to do with love, far more with hopeless deathly sad masturbation, and all this desolation and loneliness becomes visible now at last and Tracey can at last deliver us from the prison of her first life and above all from the prison of ours. Can give me a chance to grasp, across the abyss of death, that it is not the others who make us what we are lonely and abandoned and afraid, but that it is our our own blindness this years-long decades-long lifelong blindness that forbids us the sight of ourselves and sees only the Other and hangs and heaps our feelings hopes needs onto the Other, misuses him as our alter ego while the Other is an other and just as lost as we are as we are as we all are as we ourselves.

Blindness. At first glance I had not seen it at all: the naked woman crouching over the man's head has, yes, that much I had seen, her hand at her sex, somehow offering it or masturbating, or both. But only much later, looking at the photographs at home, did I discover that her face was, or is, covered or veiled with a cloth. I Will Not Be Alone¹⁸, as long as I can have a wank. Sex that has nothing to do with the one opposite, or here rather the one beneath, nothing to do with the world, trembling, blindly busy with itself and sufficient unto itself, the Other is merely needed but is utterly irrelevant. The man's head between her legs, so I later read in a text by her gallery White Cube¹⁹, is by the way supposed to be a rock. Which changes nothing about my disquiet, on the contrary, the hair, the ears and above all the long nose of this licking man seem to me to stand out all the more clearly. Above the larger-than-life bronze, neon lettering: Meet me in Heaven / I will wait For You²⁰.

Rising Again

The Bridge²¹, a bridge a table a catafalque a bed, a transparent invisible female figure, or one to be divined only in a head, shoulders, a knee, a ghost, an ethereal essence rises from a white sheet. Tracey painted herself into this picture, which at first was only meant to become a bridge, but her body in it was wrong, a false move, a kind of error, and she painted herself out again with white acrylic, but the body stayed or came back²² and rose from the sheet, an awakening or a waking up or a reawakening, a rising again, a rising from the dead a wanting to come back among the living.

Contemplation, rebirth. New, large, grieving, deeply resonant pictures that let me breathe again. At last I can stand still, pause. The blows have died down, the reeling has subsided, the pain has eased and has become something great greater grandiose: The Crucifixion²³. Sky, background, the almost life-size crucified figure all in black, the long arms diagonal across the canvas. The sky was once blue you can still see that but that has no meaning any more now the blackness tells everything everything and I stand before it and again the tears flow now wholly without a medium without pain without religion not even grief is needed only a beauty in death seldom seen a dance of the unconscious in the last breath.

Freedom

With death so clearly in view comes freedom. Nothing left to lose, everything to gain, every day, every hour we are conscious is a gift now. Always was a gift (not owed, by God, not owed, though until now we had always felt it was!), a gift, but until now we had not seen that, so short-sighted were we, and did all we could to destroy it to booze to smoke to whore around to hurt ourselves to destroy ourselves. So now that we realise all this we must do what we can. My work has taken on this whole new life, this freedom. I'm painting all the time.²⁴ Of course. And now the fear falls away too. The craving to please. The lust. The greed. The wanting. The will. What can we possibly want when we have to take off our clothes for the deathbed? What remains is freedom. I have to carry a giant bag of piss around with me most of the time. But strangely enough, I have never been happier.²⁵ When we paint write work perform love compose we have to fight for freedom at every moment our whole life long. But only now, in the second life, when all our struggles ideas searchings, our striving wanting showing coming being-I being-I-at-the-centre have fallen away like the dead skin of a snake like the weave of the cocoon like the shattered casting mould do we realise that the real fight for real freedom is in reality one and one only. The liberation from ourselves.

Somehow I stumble on, so glad of this second life she has given me my goodness what a near thing it all is how close we scrape past extinction all the time half a metre no more is death away at every moment. Outside is London the cars constantly from the wrong side and I don't take it in because The second life still has me firmly in its grip and the thousand thoughts about it.
Do you think that too, again and again, when you sit on a train or in a car or on a plane or wherever: beyond this window is death. And indeed it is. How lucky I am, still to be sitting on this side and able to read and to take photos and to write a little something down.

Note

1. Tracey Emin: A Second Life, Tate Modern, London, 27 February to 31 August 2026; from 8 October 2026 to 18 April 2027 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk.
2. My Abortion, 1990. Watercolour and ink on paper, medicine bottle, wristband and other materials. Private collection, courtesy of White Cube.
3. "confessional work": Press Association, guardian.co.uk, 3 June 1999; "Exhibitionismus einer ungehemmten Lebensbeichte", the exhibitionism of an uninhibited confession of a whole life: taz, 23 September 1997. Emin herself in the catalogue Tracey Emin: A Second Life (Tate Publishing, 2026), p. 51: "Back in the 90s, people used to say it was confessional art. It wasn't."
4. My Bed, 1998. Box frame, mattress, linens, pillows and various objects. Tate. Lent by The Duerckheim Collection 2015.
5. Its Not me Thats Crying its my Soul, 2011. Neon. Courtesy of Tracey Emin.
6. No chance (WHAT A YEAR), 1999. Appliquéd blanket. Private collection.
7. You Keep Fucking me, 2024. Acrylic paint on canvas. Private collection, c/o Xavier Hufkens.
8. zeige deine Wunde, 1974/75; first shown in February 1976 at the Kunstforum in the Maximilianstrasse underpass, Munich; in the Lenbachhaus since 1979/80.
9. Joseph Beuys in his interview with Jost Herbig, "Die Dinge haben ihre Sprache", Süddeutsche Zeitung, 26/27 January 1980; quoted from Wikipedia, "Zeige deine Wunde". In the original: Zeige deine Wunde, weil man die Krankheit offenbaren muß, die man heilen will.
10. Hotel International, 1993. Appliquéd blanket. Private collection, courtesy of White Cube. The text is on one of the patches.
11. Mad Tracey from Margate. Everyone’s been there, 1997. Appliquéd blanket. Private collection, London.
12. Just Like Nothing, 2009. Embroidered cotton. Private collection Nikolaus & Martina Hensel.
13. Self-portraits, 2020 to 2025. Photographs, digital C-prints on paper. Courtesy of Tracey Emin.
14. Diagnosis, prognosis and operation as Emin tells them in conversation with Marc-Christoph Wagner, Louisiana Channel, filmed in July 2026, from minute 46:18. The all-clear in April 2021: The Art Newspaper, 9 April 2021.
15. I Did Nothing Wrong, 2024. Acrylic paint on canvas. Mark Couling.
16. I watched Myself die and come alive, 2023. Acrylic paint on canvas. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 2024.
17. I Followed you to the end, 2024. Acrylic paint on canvas. Yale Center for British Art. Purchased with a gift from The George Economou Collection.
18. I Will Not Be Alone, 2025. Bronze. Courtesy of Tracey Emin.
19. The White Cube text on I Will Not Be Alone: Art Basel Paris, Public Program 2026.
20. Meet Me In Heaven I Will Wait For You, 2004. Neon. Courtesy of Tracey Emin.
21. The Bridge, 2024. Acrylic paint on canvas. Allemann Collection.
22. According to Emin's own account in conversation with Marc-Christoph Wagner, Louisiana Channel, filmed in July 2026, minutes 36:34 to 37:58.
23. The Crucifixion, 2022. Acrylic paint on canvas. Courtesy of Tracey Emin.
24. Tracey Emin at the Hay Festival 2023, as quoted by the BBC, 2 June 2023.
25. Tracey Emin in conversation with Laura Allsop, "50 Questions With Tracey Emin", AnOther Magazine, 8 June 2023.

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