A Bold Symphony Of Love, Loss & Survival

Tracey Emin’s solo exhibition Sex and Solitude at Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi is a profound and intimate exploration of the human condition, presented through over 60 works that span her prolific career. Curated by Arturo Galansino–Director General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi–the exhibition runs until 20th July, 2025 and offers a deeply personal yet universally resonant journey into themes of love, loss, and healing.

Tracey Emin: Sex and Solitude is the first major institutional exhibition in Italy dedicated to globally celebrated British artist Dame Tracey Emin. The exhibition’s titular themes of sex and solitude are explored through drawings, paintings, photography, embroidery, appliqué, sculptures, and neon installations. Emin’s art has always been confessional and raw, and throughout her prolific career she has worn her heart on her sleeve and channelled her experiences of love, lust, passion, illness and recovery into her art.

Since causing a stir in the 90s as one of the founder ‘YBAs’ and exhibiting her controversial, groundbreaking 1995 artwork Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995–followed by celebrity status and an outspoken appearance on Newsnight–Emin has developed into something of a national treasure in the UK–particularly in her home town of Margate where she has opened the Tracey Karima Emin (TKE) Studios in Margate, a professional artist’s studios entirely subsidized by her, with an art school programme called Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR).

The British establishment finally stepped up and paid attention to Emin’s artistic genius and contribution to the arts in general–and regeneration through the arts of Margate in particular–making her a Dame of the British Empire in 2024.

Emin has a long overdue retrospective coming up in February 2026 at Tate Modern, yet–despite an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts where her work was juxtaposed with Egon Schiele’s in 2021-Emin hasn’t had a major solo show in a UK institution yet (although she did represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007). So the Palazzo Strozzi were ahead of the curve when Director Arturo Galansino invited Emin to present a one-woman survey exhibition at the esteemed Florentine museum. The Italian art world has recognised that Emin is a master of her oeuvre and crowned her with a stunning exhibition in the birthplace of art history–Firenze.

I spoke to Palazzo Strozzi director Arturo Galansino in Florence about his collaborative vision with Emin on the monumental exhibition, which has been three years in the making.

The exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi features a wide range of works by Tracey Emin dating back to her early career through to new works recently exhibited at White Cube in London. So how did Galansino so skilfully curate this survey show from such a wide date range and variety of artworks?

Arturo Galansino: “The exhibition is the result of a long collaboration and discussion with Tracey Emin and her studio director Harry Weller, who is a very important figure. We started this discussion between me, Tracey and Harry about what to put in this exhibition. There are some very recent works, especially the monumental sculpture in the courtyard, which was exhibited at White Cube last autumn and now belongs to the Voorlinden museum in the Netherlands. There are also some very early works. That reflects my desire to give as complete image of Tracey as possible. We have a very diverse range of visitors to Palazzo Strozzi, so our idea was to offer a very complete image of the artist, which makes sense because Florence is where art history was invented. So we want to say that the contemporary artist enters into art history. So the idea was to have a complete portrait of the work of Tracey Emin.”

Galansino worked closely with Tracey on the exhibition, visiting her studio in London and creating a maquette of Palazzo Strozzi’s galleries envisioning the exhibition’s curation. There are works from collections as far afield as Asia and Australia on display at Palazzo Strozzi.

Sex and Solitude is a rather melancholy, emotionally charged title and Emin really wears her heart on her sleeve through the exhibition. I ask Galansino who came up with the title: “The title was totally her decision. It’s part of her practice: Tracey always starts a project with a title. It’s broader than that because words are the starting point. In the exhibition you can see that words are central. She had to think about what she wants to say with this show. So she came up with this very poetic title which is made by two opposite poles of her practice–sex, her senses, the wild life of her youth, and how sex is still an inspiration and important part of her life and work–and solitude. Solitude is the other side of the coin, because she needs to be alone to work. Solitude is not seen as a negative word, but in the sense that philosophers, artists and artists need to be alone to work. The word solitude is also of course related to the very dramatic illness that she had. And she speaks about the how the sickness affected her private and personal life.”

A Raw and Unflinching Artistic Journey

Emin’s art is renowned for its candidness and vulnerability, transforming personal experiences into powerful visual narratives. Her draughtsmanship and effortless ability to capture languid nude forms possesses echoes of the drawings of Egon Schiele–an early 20th century artist she has been deeply influenced by–and also evoke the raw honesty of Gustave Courbet’s controversial 1866 painting L’Origine du Monde, which depicted with startling realism the naked pubis of a female nude. Many of the nude drawings and paintings exhibited at Palazzo Strozzi follow the lineage of iconic masters of life drawing from art history, yet Emin puts her own stamp on images of the female nude, refocussing the male gaze with large-scale self-portraits painted with a palette of crimson red and a melancholy blue–perhaps a representation of Emin’s near-death experience which involved invasive operations on her body–visceral lines of paint outlining reclining a solitary reclining nude figure and running down the canvas like so many tears.

Galansino reflects on the bravery Emin displays through her art: “She’s very brave, very honest, very direct. It’s something that our public have never seen before–an artist who is so bold and so willing to open her heart and speak about herself with no filter.”

Sex & Solitude delves into Emin’s personal experiences, including her battle with cancer, which profoundly influenced her recent works. A series of paintings from this period, characterized by a melancholic blue-grey palette, reflect her isolation and introspection during recovery. These pieces, along with others like Love Poem for CF (2007)–a neon work dedicated to her great love of the ’90s–and Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), an immersive installation documenting a pivotal performance in Emin’s career, offer a glimpse into her emotional and physical journey and are testament to her unfiltered expression.

Galansino started working on the exhibition in 2022 and approached it as a survey show rather than a retrospective. He explained: “It’s not a retrospective of course; it’s more a survey. And it’s not chronological, it’s thematical. I think it works very well, because it presents the consistency of Tracey on different topics through almost four decades, because we are spanning from the 90s until now.”

A Dialogue with the Renaissance

At Palazzo Strozzi Emin’s monumental bronze sculpture I Followed You to the End (2024) dominates the Renaissance courtyard, presenting a fragmented female form that contrasts starkly with Florence’s classical art, emphasizing themes of vulnerability and resilience. The vast sculpture was exhibited at White Cube in 2024 and recalls Egon Schiele’s drawing of a nude woman bent over and viewed from behind, creating a dichotomy of vulnerability and longing. This powerful introduction sets the tone for an astonishing and brave exhibition which delves deep into the psyche of the artist and addresses universal themes of love, lust, loss, illness and fear. Emin’s bold sculpture has been installed in the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi as a public sculpture and holds its own in a historic city known for some of the most breathtaking Renaissance architecture and sculpture.

Sex and Solitude is not only a reflection of Emin’s personal narrative but also engages in a dialogue with the Renaissance tradition embodied in the architecture of Palazzo Strozzi. Her works, often characterized by bold colors and energetic gestures, juxtapose the classical art of Florence.

Reinforcing the artistic lineage between the Renaissance and Contemporary, Emin’s exhibition will be followed by a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of Fra Angelico, opening on 26th September, 2025.

Themes of Love, Loss, and Healing

Inside Palazzo Strozzi the exhibition features embroidery, neons, paintings, works on paper curated to represent the opposing yet intertwined poles of sex and solitude, which form the core of Emin’s practice.

A room inside the exhibition is dominated by a huge neon ‘Love Poem’ from 2007 with the words You put your hand across my mouth but still the noise continues. Every party of my body is screaming. Smashed into a thousand million pieces. Each pant for ever belonging to you.

Emin’s love of neon stems from her childhood in British seaside Town Margate and she transforms it into an autobiographical form of visual poetry by creating neon’s with her handwriting captured in pink neon. Emin’s poetry captures the raw passion bordering on fear of a sexual encounter, and a 2020 painting Coming Down From Love is emblazoned with the words I Wanted You To Fuck Me So Much I Couldn’t Paint Any More, representing pure longing and all-encompassing desire with abstract expressionist brushstrokes. A 2009 artwork embroidered with the words I Keep Loving You in pretty pink hues uses textiles to create a calmer, more subdued frame of mind resigned to the acceptance of loving someone.

Another highlight is a 2002 textile artwork titled I do Not Expect, a large pink blanket appliquéd with the words “I do not expect to be a Mother, but I do expect to die Alone”, which addresses Emin’s experiences of miscarriage and the lost opportunity of becoming a Mother, and also society’s expectations of women and the expectation of Motherhood.

President of the Palazzo Strozzi foundation Giuseppe Morbidelli says in the exhibition catalogue: “Emin’s strongly autobiographical approach encourages the public to deal with emotions and experiences that usually remain buried deep inside, transforming them into highly symbolic and enlightening existential metaphors–also for this reason the exhibition is helpful in knowing oneself.”

Concluding the exhibition are several works made by Emin following her invasive cancer surgery in 2020. In response to the life-changing surgery, Emin created monotype prints exploring the trauma of illness and recovery in a sombre palette of blacks and grays in the tradition of Goya and Manet. Although monochrome in palette, at the heart of these works is Emin’s joy at being alive and celebration of the life-affirming power of art.

Tracey Emin’s Sex and Solitude at Palazzo Strozzi is a compelling exhibition that invites visitors into the artist’s world of raw emotion and introspection. Through her unflinching honesty and diverse artistic mediums, Emin creates a space for reflection on the complexities of the human experience. Sex and Solitude is a must-see for those interested in contemporary art that challenges conventions and speaks to the heart.

Emin’s ability to express a huge range of emotions and encapsulate so many universal themes in her art is what makes her art so engaging and so timeless, and she fully deserves her place in the canon of art history, cemented by this once in a lifetime exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi where some of the most iconic artists originated.

Tracey Emin. Sex and Solitude is at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence until 20th July, 2025.