Tracey Emin
dal 14/11/2012 al 24/2/2013
Segnalato da
14/11/2012
Tracey Emin
Malba - Coleccion Costantini, Buenos Aires
How It Feels. Five early videos have been selected with a view to highlighting the full range of Emin's voice, which is by turns romantic, disabused, vulgar, and humorous. She distinguished herself from her peers right away for her masterful ability to tell the story of her own life with clarity and brutal honesty.
Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith
Organised with the collaboration of British Council
Malba – Fundación Costantini is pleased to announce Tracey Emin / How It Feels, the
first museum exhibition of the celebrated British artist in the Americas. The show
features five videos produced between 1995 and 2000: Why I Never Became a
Dancer, 1995; How It Feels, 1996; Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead
Children, 1998; Riding for a Fall, 1998; and Love is a Strange Thing, 2000.
Tracey Emin (London, 1963) is one of the most celebrated and controversial artists
working in the United Kingdom today. Intensely personal and emotional, her work
has an immediacy and authenticity that is unique among contemporary artists. How
It Feels will introduce Emin to the Argentinian public by presenting five of her
videoworks. “Taken as a whole, her output amounts to an attempt to capture the
flow of lived experience. The various mediums allow her to be conscious and
selfreflective on one hand and totally uninhibited on the other”, explains Philip
Larratt-Smith, curator of the exhibition.
Tracey Emin began making videos in the 1990s when she was an emerging artist
among what later came to be known as the YBAs (Young British Artists). Emin
distinguished herself from her peers right away for her masterful ability to tell the
story of her own life with clarity and brutal honesty. The unique combination of
assured performance and exhibitionistic acting out that defines her artistic
production and public persona, and that later fuelled her rise to a celebrity status
that is unmatched by any other living British artist, is on full display in these seminal
works.
The five videos in the checklist for How It Feels have been selected with a view to
highlighting the range of Emin’s voice, which is by turns romantic, disabused, vulgar,
and humorous. The lyrical beauty and poetic mood of her imagery is balanced out by
the exploration of taboo subject matter, which Emin discusses with her trademark
candour: her early discovery of sex, her abortions, gender politics, and class
structures.
In the words of the curator: “Seduction and love hold out the possibility of
redemption for Emin. Love is a force that has the power to transform her. To be in
love is to be in a heightened state of awareness, dependency, and extreme
vulnerability. All of Emin’s art can be seen as a bid for psychic integrity. It is also a
strategy to secure her position as the love object”.
On the occasion of this exhibition, Malba has published a major catalogue–with the
collaboration of British Council–that offers the first in-depth exploration of Emin’s
video work. Available in Spanish and English versions, the catalogue features a full-
colour plate section and transcripts of the films, an essay by Larratt-Smith (“Mighty
Real: A Hysteric in the Age of Pop Conceptualism”), an appreciation by artist and
author Fernanda Laguna (“What There Is”), and a conversation between Emin and
Larratt-Smith amply illustrated with images of Emin’s life and work.
Finally, Malba is pleased to announce that, in collaboration with the press Mansalva,
it will publish a companion volume, Proximity of Love, which brings together a
selection of thirty-three of the columns which Emin wrote between 2005 and 2009
for the British newspaper The Independent. This literary work, which reveals another
aspect of Emin’s total artistic project, has been specially translated into Spanish for
the first time by Cecilia Pavón. Proximity of Love will be the first in a series of joint
publications between Malba and Mansalva that will present essays, diaries, and other
literary works by or about artists featured in Malba’s exhibition program.
How It Feels will be the first in a new series of projects for Gallery 3 that present a
specific body of work or proposal by a major contemporary artist as part of Malba’s
expanded international programme.
CV
Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963, and studied at Maidstone College of Art
and the Royal College of Art, London. Her art is one of disclosure, using her life
events as inspiration for works ranging from painting, drawing, video and
installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture. In 2007 Emin represented
Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale, was made a Royal Academician, and was
awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art. During the Edinburgh
Festival in 2008, Emin's survey exhibition “20 Years'” opened at the Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art and then travelled to the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de
Málaga, Spain and the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland. In May 2011, Emin had a
major solo exhibition at the Hayward, London, “Love Is What You Want,” and was
made Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Emin currently
lives and works in London.
Related Activities
Artist’s Talk: Tracey Emin in conversation with Philip Larratt-Smith and Fernando M. Peña
Friday, November 16, 6:00 p.m.
Auditorium. Free to the general public*
The encounter will take place in English with simultaneous interpretation provided. The artist will give a book-signing following the talk.
*The tickets will be able to get from Monday, November 5, at the reception of the museum
Press contact:
Guadalupe Requena T +54 (11) 4808 6507 grequena@malba.org.ar - prensa@malba.org.ar
Opening: Thursday, November 15 7pm
Malba - Coleccion Costantini
3415 Figueroa Alcorta Avenue- Buenos Aires
Hours: Thu-Mon, 12-8pm, Wed 12-9pm
Free admission