Lot Essay
Included in the artist’s solo exhibition An Insane Desire For You at Art Projects Ibiza in 2019, I Wanted You to Fuck the Inside of my Mind is a majestic large-scale painting by Tracey Emin. Spanning two metres in height, it captures the raw, energetic vitality that characterised the artist’s canvases during this period. A female nude unfurls across the canvas, rendered in fluid, visceral lines of purple and black. Clouds of blue and white impasto rage above her, obscuring her face and running in liquid rivulets down the length of the canvas. At the bottom, Emin daubs a dash of deep red. Executed in 2018, the work takes its place within the finest period of the artist’s painterly practice, capturing the virtuosic flourishing of one of her most important media. Deeply connected to her own body, and closely bound to her sexuality, paint became a vehicle for confronting the most intimate depths of her soul. In the present work, Emin weaves figurative and abstract techniques into a vivid image of desire and longing, alive with movement, expression and sensation.
Emin’s relationship with paint has a long and complex history. As a young art student, her pregnancy and subsequent abortion in 1990 had a profound impact upon her connection with the medium. For years the smell of oil paint would induce feelings of guilt, failure and nausea. In 1996, however, Emin made a concerted effort to vanquish these associations: her landmark installation Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made saw her lock herself in a gallery and paint, totally naked, before a live audience for three weeks. This act of self-exposure was cathartic, but it would still be another decade before Emin would begin making large scale canvases again in earnest. As her practice evolved, the naked female form continued to haunt her paintings, bound in turbulent maelstrom to rich, abstract textures that frequently threaten to engulf the figure entirely. Two years after the present work, Emin would receive a devastating cancer diagnosis that required major surgery. Paint, in the aftermath of her treatment, resurfaced as a tool for healing, giving rise to major canvases such as Like A Cloud of Blood (2022).
At the time of the present work, Emin was building up to her major show Tracey Emin/Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. As she prepared to exhibit opposite one of her great heroes, the lessons of art history were very much on her mind. The present work’s rich, free gesturalism owes much to her admiration of artists such as Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell and Willem de Kooning. Her textures alternate between thick impasto and fluid washes of colour; at times her brushwork is strident and deliberate, while elsewhere it is permitted to run its own course. The figure, meanwhile, bears witness to her fervent engagement with Expressionism, which—as well as Munch—extended to a deep love of the work of Egon Schiele. While these artists laid bare their nudes, however, Emin’s remains ambiguous, veiled and overwritten by layers of paint. Like many of her canvases from this period, the work’s surface accrues in palimpsestic layers, by turns concealing and revealing itself to the viewer.
While Emin’s paintings are not explicitly self-portraits, works such as the present are innately self-reflective. Since its inception, her practice has been intricately connected to her own autobiography. Emin initially emerged as a writer, with heartfelt letters and poetry bringing her to the attention of critics and dealers. The diaristic, confessional tenor of her words would come to infuse her art, informing her neon sculptures and textile works. Her paintings, too, serve as extensions of her body and mind, capturing what she describes as ‘the deepest part of your soul that needs to come out.’ The title of the present painting, inscribed in the artist’s handwriting at the bottom of the canvas, is typical of her vernacular, its message of raw, unrequited longing directed to an unknown recipient. Perhaps it is an oblique cry in the dark; perhaps it is an address to art itself, which Emin has described as her ‘lover’ and ‘soulmate’ (T. Emin, quoted in video interview with J. Strick, An Insane Desire For You, Art Projects Ibiza, 2019). The work aches with carnal yearning, every inch of its surface alive with the artist’s touch.
Emin’s relationship with paint has a long and complex history. As a young art student, her pregnancy and subsequent abortion in 1990 had a profound impact upon her connection with the medium. For years the smell of oil paint would induce feelings of guilt, failure and nausea. In 1996, however, Emin made a concerted effort to vanquish these associations: her landmark installation Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made saw her lock herself in a gallery and paint, totally naked, before a live audience for three weeks. This act of self-exposure was cathartic, but it would still be another decade before Emin would begin making large scale canvases again in earnest. As her practice evolved, the naked female form continued to haunt her paintings, bound in turbulent maelstrom to rich, abstract textures that frequently threaten to engulf the figure entirely. Two years after the present work, Emin would receive a devastating cancer diagnosis that required major surgery. Paint, in the aftermath of her treatment, resurfaced as a tool for healing, giving rise to major canvases such as Like A Cloud of Blood (2022).
At the time of the present work, Emin was building up to her major show Tracey Emin/Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. As she prepared to exhibit opposite one of her great heroes, the lessons of art history were very much on her mind. The present work’s rich, free gesturalism owes much to her admiration of artists such as Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell and Willem de Kooning. Her textures alternate between thick impasto and fluid washes of colour; at times her brushwork is strident and deliberate, while elsewhere it is permitted to run its own course. The figure, meanwhile, bears witness to her fervent engagement with Expressionism, which—as well as Munch—extended to a deep love of the work of Egon Schiele. While these artists laid bare their nudes, however, Emin’s remains ambiguous, veiled and overwritten by layers of paint. Like many of her canvases from this period, the work’s surface accrues in palimpsestic layers, by turns concealing and revealing itself to the viewer.
While Emin’s paintings are not explicitly self-portraits, works such as the present are innately self-reflective. Since its inception, her practice has been intricately connected to her own autobiography. Emin initially emerged as a writer, with heartfelt letters and poetry bringing her to the attention of critics and dealers. The diaristic, confessional tenor of her words would come to infuse her art, informing her neon sculptures and textile works. Her paintings, too, serve as extensions of her body and mind, capturing what she describes as ‘the deepest part of your soul that needs to come out.’ The title of the present painting, inscribed in the artist’s handwriting at the bottom of the canvas, is typical of her vernacular, its message of raw, unrequited longing directed to an unknown recipient. Perhaps it is an oblique cry in the dark; perhaps it is an address to art itself, which Emin has described as her ‘lover’ and ‘soulmate’ (T. Emin, quoted in video interview with J. Strick, An Insane Desire For You, Art Projects Ibiza, 2019). The work aches with carnal yearning, every inch of its surface alive with the artist’s touch.