Walkthrough with Tracey Emin

The Memory of your Touch, the inaugural exhibition at the gallery by British artist Tracey Emin, at Xavier Hufkens spanned both galleries and encompassed works in a wide range of media — including paintings, new bronze sculptures, works on paper, neon texts and a video. The exhibition revelead the most recent developments in Emin’s intensely personal yet profoundly universal oeuvre.

Typically working from memories and dreams, the artist captures her innermost feelings in language and the materiality of her work. The human condition in all its pathos, misery and beauty – youth and maturity, love, loss and lust, intimacy, shame, guilt, grief, crisis and death – is the driving force of her art, which is tantamount to a visible manifestation of different existential states. Eschewing mimesis, Emin focuses on transmitting the emotional essence of her experiences through a confessional but open-ended dialogue with both herself and the wider world. Viewed in its entirety, her oeuvre amounts to a vast, visceral and unsparing compendium of self-knowledge that facilitates objectivity, with the artist watching and recording her own reactions like an observer.