Royal Academy, London
Munch’s paintings of troubled women are echoed dramatically in Emin’s clamouring images of herself as she struggles to exorcise her demons
If this doesn’t stop you in your tracks, nothing will. My cunt is wet with fear, reads Tracey Emin’s 1998 upper-case white neon, stark on the sombre green walls of the Royal Academy’s exhibition Tracey Emin/Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul. Planned to inaugurate Oslo’s newly relocated Munchmuseet, on the city’s harbour earlier this year, Covid has forced a change and the show is now opening in London.
More Solitude, says another neon, punctuating this juxtaposition of Emin’s selection of Munch’s paintings and watercolours with her own work. In London, the show occupies three rooms. When it goes to Oslo next summer, it will also include Emin’s My Bed, her 1998 film Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children, and a series of enlarged, insomniac self-portraits.