Tracey Emin: Second Life review – This display of undiluted love, heartache and pain left me a tearful wreck | Tracey Emin

IDon’t feel as if you’re intruding. Stepping into Trace Emin’s massive exhibition curated by Tate Modern is like walking into her crying, naked, sobbing and snotty, as if you’ve stumbled upon something painfully private.

It’s not easy to achieve in the cavernous spaces of our leading contemporary art institution, but that’s what makes Tracey – it doesn’t seem right to call her a curator, she brings you so close to knowing her, it’s Tracey, right? – Such a distinguished and important artist who defined the era.

She’s an icon, Britain’s most famous artist. She shaped a generation, shocked a nation, and changed what art could be. Since the early 1990s, she has been making art so raw, so visceral, so emotionally honest that it forces you to feel what she feels.

Tracy symbolizes the heyday of the ’90s, the sex, the drugs, the booze, the hits and the excesses, but this show isn’t about that. It’s about how she put her life out there, revealed herself – and pushed us all to come to terms with our own feelings in the process.

This is not a big, cold, white-walled celebration of her work, but rather more intimate, dark and claustrophobic. In the brutal and horrific 1995 film Why I Never Been a Dancer, Tracey talks about leaving school at 13, having degrading and abusive sex with older men, and wandering around Margate while boys cheered her on to “slag”. But in the end, all this pain turned into something joyful. “Shane, Eddie, Tony, Doug, Richard, this one’s for you,” she says, dancing to Sylvester’s disco anthem “You Make Me Feel” Mighty Real. This is our trail – she lives, feels, loves, suffers, and then turns it all into art.

It’s a simple equation that has been repeated over and over in different ways throughout her career. She turns cruel sarcasm into quilts, heartbreak into paintings, and the insults she screams at her mother — because she married a Turkish Cypriot man — into poetry.

The artist’s abortion in the early 1990s casts a big shadow. In one of the films she talks about the misery she suffered and the way people treated her afterward. In the next room there was a shelf of her hospital wristband and a small bottle of the painkiller mefenamic acid next to a display of children’s shoes. It’s almost painful.

However, the miscarriage was her “emotional suicide,” a seismic moment that changed everything. She destroyed all her art school paintings, locked herself in the studio for three and a half weeks, and started from scratch. This studio has been recreated here, covered in graffiti, empty cans of European beer and dirty laundry.

My bed is here too, so how could it not be? But for something so iconic, it doesn’t feel big or grand or like a piece that has dominated popular art discourse for decades. It’s as if you’ve been let in, as if you’ve been given access to another private moment of pain. It was never meant to make headlines or change the world, it was just the truth – the truth of someone living their life.

Living in this life has become more difficult lately. She was diagnosed with bladder cancer not long ago, and the dark hallway here is filled with pictures of her bleeding stoma. There are no limits with Tracy, you’ll have it all, no matter what. Her recovery from cancer represents the second life of the show’s title, a rebirth.

Quilts, films and installations are some of the most popular works here, but the display is full of paintings as well. Jagged, messy self-portraits in black, red and gray – Tracy’s body splayed and bleeding, lying broken in bed or standing fragile and ghostly about to collapse. Many of them are covered in semi-poetic diaries. Not all of them are great paintings, but they are moving in all their chaos and storm.

What’s not really cool is her sculptural work. Each bronze looks like a poorly made metal turd falling around the gallery. And I could happily go the rest of my life without seeing any of her new babies, all of whom look like they’re headed for the lobbies of the worst hotels on Earth.

But even when it’s bad, it’s at least real and honest. Parts of this show left me in bits. Drawing her holding her mother’s ashes completely broke me and left me missing my mother who died right before the pandemic. I was a tearful wreck, it was overwhelming. It must be exhausting being Tracy. I couldn’t feel this intensely all the time, I have to work, send emails and go to Tesco.

Don’t come here looking for a good time, you won’t find it. But come and find the pure, unapologetic, undiluted, complete love, sadness, pain, and sorrow, and you will end up feeling more emotions than you have felt for years.