British artist Tracey Emin’s newest exhibition, “Sex and Solitude,” has thrown open its doors at the historic Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy. The exhibition is on view through July 20, 2025. It displays over 60 of Emin’s works, making room for her famous neon confessions, visceral and emotive paintings and haunting bronzes. This is Emin’s first major solo exhibition in Italy. This event takes you with her on an intimate, emotional journey through her life experiences and artistic development.
So what made Emin’s work so groundbreaking, so famous, was her refusal to embrace distance or propriety, taking personal pain and sculpting it into something raw and unflinching. The exhibition includes the huge bronze sculpture “I Followed You to the End.” Her artistic resilience and vision are most evident in this grand piece. Her figurative paintings, characterized by energy, color, and abstraction, dominate the show, reflecting its two defining forces: sex and solitude.
The exhibition provides a one-of-a-kind opportunity to experience Emin’s colorful neon works in person. These works became some of the most celebrated expressions of the artist’s singular vision. As you can tell, her words are an important part of her art. This is clear not only in her neon works, but in the titles she selects for her artworks. Emin’s words are powerful and poetic, and vital to the experience of her artistic vision.
Along with her vibrant neon and bronze works, the exhibition features a beautiful installation. To accompany the exhibition, this extraordinary installation has been painstakingly rebuilt for the Palazzo Strozzi. This installation includes her earlier paintings that reconceive iconic works by male artists like Picasso, Munch, and Rothko. Through her inimitable lens, Emin masterfully confronts and subverts art history.
Emin first turned heads in the 90s. She was a member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), toiling in the trenches alongside contemporaries like Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, and Marc Quinn. Her work has never just been profoundly personal—this intimacy is what keeps audiences wanting to enter her world for the first time or the hundredth.
Then in the summer of 2020, Emin was dealt a potentially life-altering cancer diagnosis. Unfortunately, this diagnosis necessitated a radical surgery, leaving her with the removal of her bladder, uterus, cervix, section of her bowels, and half of her vagina. Through all of these struggles, Emin is now cancer-free, and still using her experiences to inspire her art.
Emin’s approach to art is still very much self-referential. Her novels most frequently tackle questions of private pain and reparation.
"I want people to feel something when they look at my work. I want them to feel themselves. That’s what matters most." – Tracey Emin
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