Love is What You Want

Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin’s Love Is What You Want, 2011 is exemplary of the artist’s ability to combine text and image to recount complex, intimate narratives. Emin, who has worked in neon for over three decades, has extensively exhibited her neons in international museums and public spaces. Each work is made from hand-blown neon tubing shaped in the artist’s distinctive scrawling penmanship. Thematically, Emin’s neons are an unrestrained depiction of the artist’s tumultuous relationship with love and heartbreak. Demonstrative and optimistic, the present example distils an epic romantic narrative into pithy verse evocative of her interior world. 

 

“Neon is emotional for everybody . . . That’s why neon is at fun fairs, casinos, red light districts and bars. It’s also to do with the way it electronically pulsates around the glass, it creates a feel-good factor.”

 

Magnificently affective, Love Is What You Want is a striking portrait of tenderness and vulnerability. Emin’s sloping letters are diaristic and emotive, as if written in a private note, and framed in a similarly organic outlined heart. Yet, in the soft glow of the red and pink neon, the artist’s private thoughts are put on display, communing directly with the viewer in an openness characteristic of Emin’s seminal works.

 

“I love writing. I think every artist has a backbone to what they do. For some it could be photography, painting, the ability to make a formal sculpture stand, but for me it's writing.”

 

Across her multidisciplinary career, which has spanned painting, needlework, installation and photography, the quality of intimate, autobiographical storytelling has remained a central tenet. The artist’s seminal early contributions, including her critically acclaimed works Tracey Emin, CV, 1995 and My Bed, 1998, are testimony the artist’s encounters with grief, love and trauma. Like these two foundational works, Love Is What You Want relishes in the intersection of poetry and visual art to present a defiant vulnerability.  

Tracey Emin Love is What You Want
Artist
Tracey Emin (b. 1963)
Title
Love is What You Want
Medium
Neon
Date
2011
Size
52 ⅜ x 58 ⅝ in : 133.0 x 149.0 cm
Edition
An artist proof aside from the edition of 3
Provenance
Galleria Lorcan O'Neill, Rome
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2019)
Private Collection
Certification
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
Reference
AC25-23
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Status
Available
Love is What You Want - Tracey Emin

Love is What You Want - Tracey Emin

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