Tracey Emin’s Sex and Solitude at Palazzo Strozzi: the must-see show of your Easter break in Florence
Tracey Emin. Sex and Solitude, the new major exhibition recently opened to the public at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, is the first institutional show in Italy by celebrated British artist Tracey Emin, featuring some 60 works from public and private collections around the world. The large body of work encompasses a variety of media and techniques, ranging from paintings, drawings, film and photography, to embroidery, appliqué, sculptures, and neon installations. Curated by Arturo Galansino, Director General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Sex and Solitude allows the public to discover one of the most influential artists in the contemporary art scene. The visit to the exhibition encourages to immerse oneself into Emin’s creative expression, exploring different moments of her career and reflecting on her personal story and life journey. By embracing the visit experience, the audience will embark on an intense and captivating exploration of the author’s autobiographical art form, which is earnest and personal and yet universally resonant, as deelpy reflecting on the themes of the body and desire. Renowned for her blunt and confessional approach to art, Tracey Emin’s figuration transforms her personal experiences into powerful and emotion-charged works, conveying raw emotions such as sexual desire, anguish, isolation and vulnerability. A large number of the works featured in the exhibition are presented in Italy for the first time, along with new productions, in different media, specifically created for the show.
The exhibition title – Sex and Solitude – is anticipated on a powerful site specific neon installation (2025) sitting on the façade of Palazzo Strozzi and introducing visitors to the declared dual theme of the show. The vivid blue of the neon light shines on the Renaissance ashlar, blending the energy of the contemporary expression with the sobriety of the XV cent. architecture of the exhibition institutional space. As visitors step into the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi, they’re are welcome by I Followed You To The End (2024), a massive bronze sculpture of a female figure that dominates the space, openly conveying a strong feeling of both desire and hurt, love and death and unveiling sexuality and frailty as the focus of the entire show. Tracey Emin places the female body, at once physical and frail, at the center of her creative exploration, translating the personal experiences from her sexual life, abuse, abortion and illness into a poignant visual form, conceiving a process of “re-understanding of these personal memories which change for our actual living experience”.
Bronze sculptures are presented in varying scales, from the majestic figures showcasing in both the courtyard and in one of the final rooms (All I want in You, 2016), to the tiny works scattered throughout the exhibition, all of them carrying the traces of the artists’ tactile touch, her fingerprints visible on the surface of the bronze. Painting is the other signature artistic form marking the quality of her work, with each canvas revealing the mastery of the painting gesture, employing rapid brushstrokes and creating a final result of passionate intensity and suspended memory.
At the heart of the exhibition, painting serves as a central expressive medium for Emin, who conveys a srong sense of emotional tension and materiality onto the canvas, as seen in works like Hurt Heart (2015), It was all too Much (2018), Everything is moving nothing Feels Safe, You made me Feel like This (2018), It – didn’t stop – I didn’t stop (2019), There was no right way (2022), There was blood (2022), I Waited so long (2022)and Not Fuckable (2024), where the artist’s painting gesture lets emerge the forms, poised between figuration and abstraction, and where the layers of color and marks retain the traces of the creative process, with visible erasures and revisions.
As affirmed by Arturo Galansino: “The exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi is not a retrospective but follows a thematic path between the opposite poles evoked by the title, representing the core of her artistic practice, an intimate dialogue between the desire for connection and the inevitable isolation of existence.”
TRACEY EMIN. SEX AND SOLITUDE
Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, until 20 July 2025
