Tag: Tracey Emin

Museum Exhibitions

Tracey Emin, triumphant survivor

Contributed by David Carrier / Now and again, I have second thoughts about my initial strong response in an art exhibition. That was the case, in a way that deserves discussion, with “Tracey Emin: A Second Life” at the Tate Modern. In Britain, Emin is an art star. Before I went to this full-scale retrospective, I knew about her two seminal works – My Bed, her famously motley and putatively sordid installation, as well as Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, the tent incorporating the names of those thus described. With a life as eventful and stressed as Van Gogh’s, she has become a feminist hero. The subtitle of this show, “A Second Life,” alludes to her survival of devastating cancer surgery. In the wake of her friend David Hockney’s death, some are calling her the greatest living English painter. 

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Solo Shows

Sam Jablon’s delicious confusion

Contributed by William Corwin / The paintings of Sam Jablon now on view at Morgan Presents produce delicious sentient confusion. The neural circuits devoted to looking at an image get crossed with those used to read text. We find the words, but, in Jablon’s hands, we don’t know what to do with them. Fuck, for example, a little 18-inch square painting in solid yellow with blue with black lettering, seems less about sex and more about the frustrated expletive. Or perhaps it’s a cold command, broken down into two letters on top, F and U, and two letters below, C and K. We also fix…

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Solo Shows

Camilla Fallon: Womanizer

Contributed by Amanda Church / Following the fleshy path of Rubens, Lucian Freud, Joan Semmel, and Cecily Brown, among many others, Camilla Fallon has recently focused her loose, lush brushwork on the female body’s midsection, specifically the navel. “The Navel Is the Center,” her current show at The Painting Center, consists of eight medium-scale paintings and four very small ones, most providing an intimate view of this inverted body part. Under such close scrutiny, it becomes symbolic, implying vulnerability, contemplation, and introspection. 

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