Tracey Emin’s work has always blurred the lines between confession and confrontation—but in Sex and Solitude, the quiet is almost louder than the pain. Installed across the frescoed rooms of Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi, the exhibition brings together new and existing works that touch on desire, trauma, memory, and physical presence—with a rawness that’s deeply personal and unflinchingly human.
Large-scale drawings, paintings, neons, and sculpture stretch across rooms that once held Medici wealth and Renaissance ideals. Emin’s figures—sprawled, writhing, exposed—stand in sharp emotional contrast to the formality of the space, but never feel out of place. They take up room without asking. They remind us of the body’s vulnerability and power, of longing and loss, of survival.
The title itself—Sex and Solitude—sets the tone: intimacy not as seduction, but as something sacred, sometimes brutal, always real.
This is Emin at her most distilled: bold but spare, feral but precise. A show not just about what’s been endured, but what it takes to keep telling the story.
On view at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
Exhibition dates: March 2 – July 21, 2024
Curated by Arturo Galansino
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