Tracey Emin: The Vanishing Lake
Tracey Emin
The Vanishing Lake
6 Fitzroy Square, London W1T 5DX
7 October – 12 November (Closed 19-23 October) 2011
‘She looked into the mirror…
I made a fool of myself again. A fool like a stupid child. A child that has never known love… A soul that has never been touched. Then she began to cry.
Knowing that every thing is as it should be…
She was a fool.
It was all too late…The lake had gone…
The vanishing lake is not a metaphor… It is a real lake… it is small and magical looking… but only exists from autumn to spring… in the summer… it is just a dry dusty barren bowl…
The only metaphor is often…This is how I feel.’
An extract from ‘The Vanishing Lake’
Tracey Emin Autumn 2011
White Cube announces a special site-specific exhibition by Tracey Emin, ‘The Vanishing Lake’. The title is taken from her novel, which has been a catalyst for a series of new works created for exhibition in the Georgian house at 6 Fitzroy Square.
Emin relishes the opportunity of showing in historical surroundings, previously exhibiting at the Foundling Museum and Freud’s former home in London as well as the British Pavilion in Venice in 2007. Now Emin has chosen an eighteenth century house, designed as part of a terrace by the neoclassical architect, Robert Adam in 1794. Fitzroy Square was home to numerous artists and writers before the war, but subsequently many of the properties became commercial businesses and number 6 became a bank. However, in the 1990’s the Georgian group restored the building to its original domestic design – and this evolution of purpose corresponds with the ethos of ‘The Vanishing Lake’.
The seasonal disappearance and reappearance of the lake by Emin‘s home in France informs a series of new ‘Self Portraits’ that reflect and absorb a personal metamorphosis. With titles including: ‘Knowing how I am’, ‘Anatolian Princess’ and ‘Beautiful Girl’, Emin portrays her multifaceted past by drawing from Picasso’s intimate portrayals of his long-standing muse and mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Pleas of unrequited love and touching melancholia are conveyed in a series of embroidered texts and drawings to be shown alongside the exposed vulnerability of an isolated figure captured in a series of hand-woven tapestries. Scaled up from intimate works on canvas, the tapestries produced by the West Dean tapestry studios continue Emin’s interest in the domestic and handcrafted tradition. In addition, tiny hand-modeled bronze figures pray either side of a pregnant bronze figure in ‘Prayers for Mother’. As visitors enter or leave the exhibition, a neon text enigmatically recounts: ‘I followed you into the water knowing I would never return’.
Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin’s 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. Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in candid and, at times, excoriating work that is frequently both tragic and humorous.
Emin’s work has an immediacy and often sexually provocative attitude that firmly locates her oeuvre within the tradition of feminist discourse. By re-appropriating conventional handicraft techniques – or ‘women’s work’ – for radical intentions, Emin’s work resonates with the feminist tenets of the ‘personal as political’. In Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With, Emin used the process of appliqué to inscribe the names of lovers, friends and family within a small tent, into which the viewer had to crawl inside, becoming both voyeur and confidante. Her interest in the work of Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele particularly inform Emin’s paintings, monoprints and drawings, which explore complex personal states and ideas of self-representation through manifestly expressionist styles and themes.
Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963, and studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. She has exhibited extensively internationally, including solo and group exhibitions in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Japan, Australia, The United States and Chile. In 2008 Emin held her first major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which subsequently toured to Malaga (2008) and Bern in 2009. 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, London, a Doctor of Letters from the University of Kent and Doctor of Philosophy from London Metropolitan University. She lives and works in London.
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