(Credits: Piers Allardyce)
Acclaimed artist Tracey Emin has claimed that male artists tend to peak earlier, but women have more longevity in their creativity.
Emin, who won the Turner Prize in 1999, is known for using her personal life within her work, using a mixture of media to express this through paintings, sculptures and photographs, reflecting her own private life and sometimes taboo subject matter in her work.
When speaking on The Louis Theroux Podcast, Emin compared her career to that of Damien Hirst, a fellow artist who has also been a recipient of the esteemed Turner Prize.
Hirst was awarded the prize in 1995 with a piece entitled Mother and Child, Divided, showing a cow and calf that had both been preserved in formaldehyde. Meanwhike, Emin was the recipient of the award in 1999 for My Bed, an installation of her own bed and its different uses over a long period of time.
While speaking to Theroux about Hirst, Emin said: “Damien was a young artist that started off with a lot of that belief and a lot of that conviction. He was like a force. And now he’s not. Men sort of peak in their forties, while women just tend to come and come and come and come and come, so as a woman, you carry on coming all your life until you’re old”.
Furthermore, Emin also talked about women’s ability to create work much later in life, and referred to the French artist Louise Bourgeois, known for her ambitious sculptures and installations, who continued to create until she died at the age of 98.
She elaborated: “Like now, if you look [at the painter] Joan Mitchell, for example, she’s like undoubtedly one of the greatest American abstract painters ever, better than Jackson Pollock.”
Emin’s recent work includes a series of paintings, called Lovers Grave, which was exhibited at the White Cube in New York earlier this year and inspired by images taken at archaeological burial sites where human remains were found holding onto each other.
With the series, Emin wanted to explore the idea of love and violence in this exhibition, which was also partly inspired by her cancer diagnosis three years earlier and the operation she had in order to remove numerous reproductive organs from her body.
The British artist is currently showing a series of work called I Followed You To The End, which is being displayed at the White Cube in London, looking at the intersection between love, loss and mortality, also inspired by her own recent experiences.
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