Tracey Emin | Lovers Grave
White Cube through January 13
For the inaugural solo exhibition at White Cube's New York space, Tracey Emin looked to images of archaelogical burial sites where excavated human remains showed people holding each other in a seeming embrace. This exploration and quest for everlasting love has to some extent always been present in Emin's work beginning with her earliest seminal works such as Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (or "the tent") in which she embroidered a tent with the names of everyone she had ever slept in a bed with from 1963 to 1995. The current show has a visceral dynamism that doesn't fail to startle and embrace the viewer with its vigorous gestures, blood red canvases, and rapturous scenes of lovemaking as you walk through the space contemplating love and loss.