Tracey Emin’s Tate Modern exhibition comes with a reading list that reveals as much about the artist as the works on view.
At London’s Tate Modern, assistant curator Jess Baxter has selected five books that trace the arc of Emin’s career, from her early autobiography to recent reflections on painting after illness. The list accompanies Second Life, the artist’s latest exhibition, which was shaped by the changes in her life and work following a bladder cancer diagnosis in 2020.
The most immediate entry point is Strangeland (2006), Emin’s autobiography. In Baxter’s view, it remains essential for understanding the artist’s voice: the book moves from her difficult childhood in Margate to her travels through Turkey and Cyprus, and it does so in short, direct chapters that mix prose, poetry, and unflinching personal detail. It is a portrait of an artist who has long treated memory as both subject and material.
Also included is Tracey Emin: Works 1963-2006, published in 2006 by Carl Freedman and Honey Luard. Though no longer in print, Baxter describes it as invaluable, especially for the conversations between Emin and her longtime friend and gallerist Carl Freedman. Those exchanges address questions central to her practice: how she makes art, why painting matters, and how she thinks about sex and passion.
Tracey Emin Paintings (2024), by David Dawson, Jennifer Higgie and Emin, offers a more recent view of the work. Bound in Emin’s trademark crimson, the book gathers 300 glossy images and includes an essay by Higgie on the emotional charge of the paintings, Emin’s favored medium. The publication helps decode recurring motifs and symbols across her acrylic works.
Tracey Emin: My Photo Album (2013), by Emin, Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell, turns to the archive of the artist’s own life. Family photographs, images of Emin in punk-era styling, and early studio and gallery shots show works such as the blankets and tent taking shape. The book makes visible the distance between the private moments and the public objects they became.
The final title, My Heart Is This: Tracey Emin on Painting (2026), by Martin Gayford, places Emin within the broader lineage of Western art history while addressing the physical, emotional, and artistic changes that followed her 2020 diagnosis of squamous cell bladder cancer. It underscores a central fact of Emin’s recent work: illness altered her life, but not her commitment to painting.
Together, the five books form a layered portrait of an artist whose practice remains inseparable from autobiography, recovery, and reinvention. For viewers at Tate Modern, they offer a way to read Second Life with greater precision — and to see how Emin has turned survival into a sustained artistic language.
