LONDON.- Christie’s will present Tracey Emin’s Like A Cloud of Blood (2022, estimate: £500,000-700,000): an outstanding, deeply personal painting which is being sold by the artist to benefit her pioneering TKE Studios in Margate. An abbreviation of the artist’s full name, Tracey Karima Emin, this revolutionary studio complex and residency programme intends to foster new generations of talent, and to create a thriving artistic hub in her home town. The painting will be on view in London from 6 to 13 October, ahead of the 20th / 21st Century: Evening Sale, which takes place on 13 October 2022.
Having repeatedly referenced her Margate upbringing throughout her oeuvre, Emin has become a passionate cultural advocate for the Kent seaside town since returning in 2017. With 12 subsidised professional artist studios, a rigorous exhibition cycle and two-year residencies for 15-20 students with free studios, tutorials and lectures, Emin hopes to create an inspirational ‘artists’ haven’, governed by an ethos of intergenerational dialogue, creative commitment and spirited debate and critique. TKE Studios is set in a former bathhouse and mortuary.
Tracey Emin: “I don’t want to die being an artist that made really interesting work. I want to make a future. If my art can make something happen for the future, then I’m doing the right thing. I’ve been all the way around the world in all directions and come back again. And this, Margate, is what I’ve chosen.”
Katharine Arnold, Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Christie’s Europe: “Throughout her career, Tracey Emin has invited viewers to share in the most intimate aspects of her life. With extraordinary candour and a vivid vision, in Like a Cloud of Blood she lets us in to her world following her cancer diagnosis. The searing honesty we are accustomed to in her oeuvre resonates with her audience even more so in this painting. It is a renewed vigour for life that has driven Tracey to create this unparalleled opportunity for artists in her home town and it is a great honour to help her realise this project by offering the painting as a highlight in the 20th / 21st Century: London Evening Sale.”
Painted in her first wave of creativity after her recovery from bladder cancer in 2020, Like a Cloud of Blood captures the powerful release of emotion and energy she experienced after a long period of being unable to make art. Emin's recent paintings represent a vital new chapter in her rich, autobiographical practice. More keenly attuned than ever before to the power and fragility of the human form, they offer visceral expressions of hope, turmoil, pain and healing. Emin’s long and complex relationship with paint has often been deeply tied to her own body.
