Tracey Emin’s 'I Followed You To The End' - A Brutal Confession of Suffering

The artist’s latest exhibition at London’s White Cube is a haunting tracing of her journey through love and suffering.

Tracey Emin, The End of Love, 2024 (Image Credit: Sheraz Zingraff) 

Upon first entering through White Cube’s Bermondsey doors, there is a subtlety to Emin’s latest collection—an illusive gesture of timid restraint. Moving along the gallery’s hallway, adorned with miniature paintings, we are offered a taste of the raw, visceral honesty in store. Emin intimately draws on her life as primary source material, finding inspiration and transformative creative perspective from her recent life-threatening cancer diagnosis. Playing with themes of love and loss, the provocative artist offers an emotive, unfiltered exploration of grief and resurrection.

Tracey Emin, I Followed You To The End, 2024 (Image Credit: Sheraz Zingraff) 

The concept behind Emin’s I Followed You to the End stems from recorded documentation of the excavation of human remains from archaeological burial sites. Poignant and poetic, the human remains have been found clutching onto one another as though locked in an everlasting embrace. Emin delves into such universal motifs of eternal devotion between lovers, transcending the realms of life and death. 

Tracey Emin Blood-Blood and More Blood, 2024 (Image Credit: Sheraz Zingraff) 

The renowned English artist, inspired by the long-lasting presence of love in sepulchral settings, describes the impassioned phenomenon as a metaphorical phoenix rising from the ashes: “I was thinking about when you really believe in something or someone, and you will do anything for them, you will follow them to the complete end… by following something or someone to the end, I realised it was the end, because I knew where the end was.”

Tracey Emin, I Followed You To The End, 2024 (Image Credit: Sheraz Zingraff) 

Emin’s dripping paintings trace a narrative of messy, unwavering liberation yet simultaneously of tortured, shameful agony. Their gory vulnerability, entrenched with the tortuous splaying of blood, is both piercing and evocative, weaving a tangled evisceration of the artist’s body and suffering. The emotional anguish of the ghostly curled-up lovers, naked and lying in bed, is inescapable, drawing you into the bare, suffocating depths of the figures’ inner entrapment.  

Tracey Emin, My Dead Body – A Trace of Life, 2024 (Image Credit: Sheraz Zingraff) 

Bodies fade into tender lavender pastels whilst blood spurts from a figure’s groin, a lyrical play on the tenderness of vitality and the personification of inevitable death. Emin’s ravaging depictions of torment are met with diaristic confessions, one of which reads, ‘I don’t want to have sex because my body feels dead.’

The artists’ explicit confrontations with the wounds of mortality are a triumphant love letter to the dance between defiance and despair. An embodiment of sincerity and rageful anguish, Emin’s latest body of work is an offering of haunting honesty.