Royal Academy, London
Emin’s ability to evoke suffering is brought to full expression in this visceral pairing with the Norwegian painter
Those old critical strictures to look at the work, not the life, have never made any sense with Tracey Emin. Her work has always been her life exposed in messy closeup, as if her body and soul – she has hardly ever recognised any separation – could be turned inside out for all the world to examine.
This delayed Royal Academy show, in which Emin pairs her own work with selected works by her fellow primal screamer Edvard Munch, feels something like the climax of that visceral relationship. You approach it, if you have read the papers, in the knowledge that in the months in which the exhibition has been waiting in lockdown the artist has undergone radical surgery for an aggressive cancer that was only diagnosed in June.