Tracey Emin

Sex and Solitude probably represents a summa of the neon works created over the years by Tracey Emin. The British artist has been able to experiment with remarkable effectiveness across a multiplicity of languages: from installation to painting, from drawing to photography, from sculpture to video. Yet the luminous works hold a special role for the way they reveal her skill with words. Nothing like neon allows the “word to become light”, for language to take on a visible form while still appearing without body, without weight. The spiritual allusion is not accidental. Emin speaks to our soul, to our spirit, in the everyday nature of existence, made of despair and joy, hope and fear, impulse and pain – central themes of her work. In its bare simplicity, Sex and Solitude contains everything, and it is almost impossible not to perceive it as a cry of pain.

Tracey Emin writes well, very well, she is as skilled with words as she is with colours and brushes. Are these brief phrases rendered in light perhaps poems? Certainly their poetic value is immense and they strike directly at the heart every time. The poeticism of these neon works arises, as with great poets and writers of aphorisms, from the mathematical precision with which the words are placed in sequence: any minimal variation in vocabulary or order would shatter that fragile and perfect balance. They are messages entrusted to a bottle and set adrift with the hope that someone might find them and reach us, making us feel less alone.

The acquisition of this work in the Luci d’Artista collection represents an essential contribution: the project is in fact shaping up as an exemplary collection of the evolution of art created through light sources, and the British artist could not be missing.

Tracey Emin represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and was elected a Member of the Royal Academy in the same year. In February 2026, the Tate Modern in London will inaugurate the most extensive retrospective ever dedicated to her work.

Antonio Grulli

Sex and Solitude (2025) enters the Luci d’Artista collection thanks to the support of Fondazione Arte CRT.