Tracey Emin: A Second Life

Tate Modern announces major retrospective, opening February 2026

Next spring, Tracey Emin will open what will be the most significant exhibition of her career to date at Tate Modern. Titled A Second Life, the show will bring together more than ninety works spanning four decades of practice — including early installations, key paintings, and recent bronzes created in the years following her recovery from cancer.

Tracey founded TKE Studios in 2021, establishing a new residency programme, studio complex, and gallery in Margate, the town where she was born and now lives. That decision — to bring resources, time, and space back to a place often overlooked in the national art conversation — was never about nostalgia. It was about possibility, and about insisting that artists working outside of London deserve serious support. In many ways, A Second Life speaks to the same ethos.

The exhibition will chart a trajectory from the earliest works of Tracey’s "first life" — including the seminal My Bed and Why I Never Became a Dancer, set in Margate — through to recent pieces made in direct response to illness, recovery, and the realities of living with a stoma. The works in this later period are unapologetic and unromantic, returning to the body with urgency and precision. They don’t ask for sympathy. They ask to be seen clearly.

The show includes paintings, sculpture, neon, moving image, and textile works. Some of these have never been shown before, including The Last of the Gold (2002), a quilt that functions as both a personal and public reckoning with abortion and access to care. Other pieces, like Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, demonstrate how early performance and destruction remain embedded in the logic of Tracey's current practice.

TKE isn’t a footnote to this story — it’s part of the same movement. The artists who pass through our residency programmes often engage with the same questions: how to make art from experience; how to speak plainly without losing depth; how to locate the personal inside broader political realities. Tracey’s practice — and this exhibition — makes clear that these aren’t new concerns, and that they don’t get easier with time. But they do get sharper.

Tracey has said this exhibition will be a “benchmark” — a way of looking back and looking forward. We think it also signals something else: that serious, vulnerable, embodied work can still take up space. And that a second life isn’t a soft return — it’s a decision to begin again, with clarity.

Tracey Emin: A Second Life
Tate Modern, London
26 February – 30 August 2026

More information at tate.org.uk