From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Martina Droth, director of the Yale Center for British Art, explains how a painting by Tracey Emin that has recently entered the museum’s collection grapples with universal themes of love and grief.
The painting I Followed you to the end was made by Tracey Emin in early 2024, in her studio in Margate, where she now spends much of her time. Since her recovery from bladder cancer surgery in 2020, Tracey has been deeply committed to painting, and she has been making works with an urgency and intensity that has come to define her art. The title is quintessentially Tracey, who often talks about love, and I see in it a sorrowful poem dedicated to love that is lost. Whether real or not, it’s a suggestion of a relationship that has fallen apart; she reflects on the love that has been broken over the years, over a lifetime.
This is one of her vertical format canvases, which often centre on a single figure, almost like a traditional portrait. It has a human scale – when you stand in front of it, the figure meets you directly, allowing you to relate to it in a very immediate way. Though it has this human dimension, it is large enough to be immersive. There are four paintings in the exhibition that follow this format, each centered around a figure that commands attention at the heart of the canvas.
Tracey’s work is invariably figurative, but not in a literal way: she uses the figure to capture an emotional world – what the body is feeling, rather than what the body looks like. There’s a straightforwardness to her paintings, in the sense that they are based on what’s around her: her own body, her bed, her experiences and inner life. Yet their complexity emerges through the process itself – each layer of paint suggests the next move and builds an emotion rather than a fixed subject. Her works often appear unfinished or sketch-like, but this is integral to their power; the painting is complete on its own terms, and its abstract qualities help achieve a sense of ambiguity – you can read so many meanings into it.
I Followed you to the end (2024), Tracey Emin. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. © Tracey Emin; All rights reserved, DACS 2024. Gift of George Economou
Tracey paints very spontaneously, but she often makes paintings over long periods of time – when she goes back to a piece, something completely different may reveal itself, lending her work a sense of intensity and depth. Painting takes a huge amount of energy. She often paints with her studio director, Harry Weller, working on canvases that may have stood in the studio for months or even years on end.
I Followed you to the end stands out for the way it combines writing with painting. Writing has always been central to Tracey’s creativity. At the beginning of her career, this is where she found success: in 1994 she self-published a memoir about her life in Margate from birth to age of 13, and used the money from her sales to fund a book tour across America. In the painting, as with her neons, she’s found a powerful way to integrate text – or, more specifically, her handwriting – into her visual language. ‘I followed you to the end’ is a simple phrase – almost romantic – but it carries so much weight. We can all see the vast universe of emotion that it conjures up. The words ‘the end’ – which are in capital letters on a separate line – remind me of the last page of a fairy tale, but they also make me think of how Tracey has confronted her mortality.
You can see how the upper half of the painting has developed, emerging from layers of paint. The drips run down, creating a sense of movement but also dissolving the lower part of the body. She paints with acrylics, which she began using in the 1990s after she became pregnant. She had a crisis with oil painting when she found she could no longer stand the smell – she never went back to it. Some areas are saturated with paint while others are left bare; that’s characteristic of many of her paintings. In this case, half of the canvas is left open, with the lower portion functioning like a page from a journal or a letter. You can almost imagine the figure writing these sentences: they’re integrated into the painting, part and parcel of the whole.
Tracey’s palette is intentionally limited – by using fewer colours, she allows those she does use to come over with a striking intensity. Here, she writes with paint in her distinctive and recognisable cursive handwriting, using a deep, almost black blue.
There are hues of red that you see in many of her paintings, especially recent ones. Red can denote so many things: it’s the colour of love, Valentine’s Day, roses. It’s an uplifting colour in that sense – the colour of passion. But on the flip side of passion and love is pain and trauma, and to me, there’s always an underlying suggestion of blood. Tracey often uses red in this way; the actual substance of blood shares some of the viscous qualities of acrylic paint. And it ties to that flip side of love, that deep pain, like a physical wound. To me, the colour red draws those meanings together in her paintings.
There is something very powerful about the figure emerging from the shadows of her emotional world into a new light. It’s unclear whether this figure feels a newfound strength or sense of empowerment at the end of a relationship; perhaps she’s moving on to a new chapter, she’s saying ‘like a fool, I kept loving you and investing all of myself, I followed you to the end – but no more.’
I Followed you to the end (2024; detail), Tracey Emin. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. © Tracey Emin; All rights reserved, DACS 2024. Gift of George Economou
The painting has so much energy and intensity. It radiates the enthusiasm and urgency of Tracey’s technique. Painting is without question her primary medium and her primary focus. Although it has taken the art world quite a long time to see that, she has been clear about what painting means to her for a long time.
I got to know Tracey during the pandemic when we did a talk together – and although I’ve known her work since the ’90s, what I hadn’t fully taken on board until our conversation was her depth of passion and knowledge as a painter. Before her solo show for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007, her work was associated with a handmade aesthetic: her makeshift sculptures, the neons, the textiles and monoprints. When she announced in her column in the Independent that she was renting a studio and making new paintings for the biennale, it was entirely unexpected. But she’s been committed to painting for a very long time – it’s what she studied at the Royal College – and the work she is making now has come into its own, always centred on the figure, the body and its emotional world.
I’m so pleased that this painting is now in our collection, thanks to a generous gift. Even though this is the only painting by Tracey that viewers will see in our museum after the show closes, I believe it is so characteristic of her work that people will understand something essential about Tracey: that she will convey what she wants to say by whatever means possible—whether through image, through text, colour, or even the way that the words are written. In I Followed you to the end, we get Tracey’s whole heart; the writing and the title feel profound to me. The painting draws you in as you pause to read the text and decipher her handwriting.
It’s a personal message, a time stamp of emotion in a specific moment – intimate and relatable, it’s Tracey Emin par excellence. While her work has always been seen as autobiographical, her answer to that is that most artists start from a personal place. Yes, her work comes from personal experience, but it’s also about universal themes, about love, about grief and the experience of inhabiting a woman’s body.
As told to Lucy Waterson.
‘Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until the Morning’ is at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, from 29 March to 10 August
From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.