Tracey Emin is the star of the exhibition inaugurated a few weeks ago at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. Before the opening, a group of students from the Art Department of Istituto Marangoni Firenze has been invited to a private meeting with the artist. Questions formulated by the students guided the intense conversation between Tracey Emin and Arturo Galansino, Director General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and curator of the exhibition
Sex and solitude are the underlying themes of Tracey Emin’s exhibition, which brings together in the Florentine spaces of Palazzo Strozzi more than sixty works including painting, installation, drawing and sculpture. These concepts, and the questions posed by a group of students from the Art Department of Istituto Marangoni Firenze, are the starting point for the engaging dialogue between the British artist and the curator of the exhibition and Director General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi Arturo Galansino.
BIO
Tracey Emin DBE RA was born in 1963 in Croydon, London, and grew up in the seaside town of Margate. Her work spans drawings, paintings, tapestries, embroidery, film, bronze sculptures, and neon signs. The artist draws on her own life to inform her work, referencing deeply intimate experiences from her sexual history, abuse, and abortion to gender, relationships, and, most recently, her cancer and disability.
In 1999 she attracted huge publicity when she was nominated for the Turner Prize and exhibited My Bed at Tate Gallery, London. From there, Emin’s career continued to grow: in 2007 she represented the United Kingdom at the 52nd Venice Biennale, in 2011 she was made the Royal Academy’s Professor of Drawing, one of the first two female professors in the history of the institution.
Today Emin enjoys full institutional recognition. She has recently opened the Tracey Karima Emin (TKE) Studios in Margate, a professional artist’s studios entirely subsidized by her, with an additional free, studio-based, art school programme called Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR).
In 2024, she was honoured with a Damehood in the King’s Birthday Honours for her services to art.
Arturo Galansino (Nizza Monferrato, 1976) has been the general director of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence since 2015. He previously gained important curatorial experience at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
INFO
Tracey Emin. Sex and Solitude
until 20 July 2025
PALAZZO STROZZI
Piazza Strozzi, Florence
https://www.palazzostrozzi.org/
Video: Tracey Emin. Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Video The Factory Prd. Cover photo Ludovica Arcero SayWho. © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025
Cover photo: Tracey Emin and Arturo Galansino at Palazzo Strozzi on the occasion of the exhibition Tracey Emin. Sex and Solitude. Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo Ludovica Arcero, Saywho. Courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
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