NEW HAVEN, CONN.- The Yale Center for British Art reopened to the public with a special exhibition of work by Tracey Emin (b. 1963), one of Britain’s most influential contemporary artists. Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning is the first presentation of Emin’s work in a North American museum and the first ever solo museum exhibition to foreground her practice as a painter.
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For more than thirty years, Emin has made expressive and candid works that explore love, loss, hope, desire, and grief. With honesty and deep emotion, her art draws on her personal experiences of illness, intimacy, and sexuality to confront broader concerns about women’s bodies and health.
Shaped through ongoing dialogue with the artist, I Loved You Until The Morning showcases nineteen large-scale paintings, set alongside a selection of drawings, sculptures, and a neon installation that welcomes visitors at the entrance to the YCBA’s iconic Louis I. Kahn building. Drawn from private collections around the world, many of the works have never been shown in a public institution. Together, they demonstrate Emin’s commitment to painting as a means of giving expression to her experience.
“It is a privilege to present Tracey Emin’s inaugural museum exhibition in this country and to introduce her work to a broader American audience,” said Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director, YCBA, who curated the exhibition working closely with Emin and the artist’s creative director, Harry Weller. “Showing the work at the YCBA offers a chance to engage with her art from a new perspective, separate from the established narratives in Britain. Although she has long been a defining figure in contemporary British art, this exhibition provides a unique opportunity to experience her deeply personal, provocative, and often meditative explorations of identity, trauma, and resilience. By placing her work in dialogue with that of J. M. W. Turner, we not only highlight their shared roots in Margate and at the Royal Academy but also illuminate how Emin’s voice resonates within a broader historical context of British art.”
“This is my first museum show in America and for me it makes perfect sense that I’m showing in the Yale Center for British Art,” noted Emin. “For me, it feels like the perfect introduction.”
Born in London and raised in the seaside town of Margate, England, Emin made her mark in the 1990s with sculptural installations that became icons of the era. Although she is known for working across a wide range of media, including neons and textiles, Emin began her artistic journey as a painter and has long considered painting her primary medium. When she was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007, Emin resolved to make a public return to painting. I Loved You Until The Morning traces the evolution of her paintings over the subsequent decades.
I Loved You Until The Morning shows how Emin uses the materiality of paint to convey emotional states that veer from the most life-affirming to the most harrowing aspects of being a woman. The multiple emotional registers of her works leave their meanings open-ended: the use of red evokes love and desire, as well as pain, trauma, and injury. The female figure unites her works across media and decades and becomes the channel for personal experiences that are at once universal and timely in their relevance.
Spanning her painting career from Pelvis High (2007), one of the works Emin exhibited in Venice, to the very recent I Followed you to the end (2024), the selection shows both the consistency of her subject matter and the evolution of her expression. Emin’s primary subject is the female body—sometimes rendered as a fully legible form, sometimes fragmented or incomplete. Yet her concern is not the body’s appearance, but how it becomes a register of emotions. Her evocative use of color, incorporation of text, outline drawing of figures, and overpainting are the leitmotifs through which she has developed a personal emotional language that transcends individual expression to convey universal ideas.
One of Emin’s largest paintings, And it was love (2023), exemplifies the artist’s unique candor. Almost hidden amid drips of paint, a small circle on the figure’s stomach and a line extending from it represent a stoma connected by a tube to a urostomy bag, recasting the work as a self-portrait made after Emin’s devastating bladder cancer surgery in 2020. Her raw portrayal challenges codes of silence around the messy details of the human body.
I Followed you to the end (2024)—recently gifted to the YCBA and one of Emin’s first paintings to be accessioned to a public museum—touches on motifs central to Emin’s practice. Red drips of paint run down the torso of a central figure to intermix with a radically candid poem about love and loneliness. The reference to “the end” in both the text and the title points to the layered and open-ended meanings of Emin’s work—invoking the end of love as well as a confrontation of mortality.
In preparation for the opening, YCBA curators and educators convened discussion groups with campus and community thought partners—including Yale SHARE (Sexual Harassment and Assault Response and Education Center), Yale’s Office of Gender and Campus Culture, and STARS, a teen peer educator group—to develop programming and resources that empower audiences to engage with Emin’s work via multiple entry points.
The exhibition’s immersive design draws visitors into Emin’s expressive world even before they enter the museum. A bold new neon work created especially for the Entrance Court will be visible from the street to passersby twenty-four hours a day.
By contextualizing Emin’s work within the Center’s building and collection, I Loved You Until The Morning invites audiences to discover and see anew her pioneering art. Thirteen never-before-exhibited drawings, selected by Emin from her personal archive, will be on view in the Study Room, home to the museum’s exceptional collection of works on paper. The display visibly embeds Emin’s works within the history of British drawing traditions.
Fittingly, I Loved You Until The Morning coincides with an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and prints by J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851). Although born almost two hundred years apart, Turner and Emin share an understanding of the expressive potential of paint. Their distinctive ways of looking at the world were shaped by the seaside town of Margate, on England’s eastern coast, where both spent formative periods of their lives. Their work now meets in New Haven, a continent away from their shared experience of place. In this way, the historic and the contemporary connect as part of a larger story of British art that spans geography and time.
I Loved You Until The Morning will be on view through August 10, 2025.
The exhibition was curated by Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director, with Tracey Emin and her creative director, Harry Weller.
Born in London in 1963, Emin is a British artist known for her autobiographical artwork. Her paintings lay bare intimate and private experiences that veer from the prosaic to the most profound and life-affirming aspects of being a woman. Emin came to prominence in the 1990s as a multidisciplinary artist known for her sculptural installations and her use of unconventional materials such as textiles and neon. But she began her career as a painter, and in the last two decades has returned to painting as her primary medium.
Emin was elected to the Royal Academy in 2007 and became its Eranda Professor of Drawing in 2011. In 2024, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts. In 2020, Emin founded TKE Studios in Margate, Kent, her former hometown. TKE Studios provides affordable studio space for professional artists and also hosts TEAR (Tracey Emin Artist Residency), a training program for emerging artists. Emin lives and works in London, Margate, and the South of France.
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