Tracey Emin has been saying goodbye since the moment she arrived. When she got her first gallery show back in 1993, at the newly opened White Cube, she christened it ‘My Major Retrospective’, convinced that between self-destructive partying and bouts of depression, it would probably be her last, too. Though the intervening decades have only proven her staying power, her art has continued to communicate a valedictory sentiment: from the sexual memorial of
Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995) to the slew of titles that, like
The Last Thing I Said to You is Don’t Leave Me Here (1999), have read as telegraphic snippets from a never-ending breakup. Like the slamming of a door, her work conveys the desire to be off and away, and to be remembered indelibly in the process – while forever sneaking back, to see how the grand exit has gone down.