Emin is regarded as one of Britain’s most significant contemporary artists. Drawing on personal experiences, and often using her own body as a subject, she portrays painful and intimate situations with brutal honesty and poetic humour, using a wide variety of media. Hers is a unique and particular form of confessional art that has a non-voyeuristic intimacy, since her stories are neither tragic nor sentimental and often deeply resonate with their audience. 

While the paintings at first appear simple and immediate, many of them are the result of application, obliteration and layering over a period of many years. Emin repeatedly returns to the canvases as a means of reviewing, revising and reconsidering her own position in relation to painting. Their subject matter can be rawly sexual, but their candour is tinged with emotion and pathos, as is the title of the show. A series of bronze bas relief plaques portray figures that appear amorphous yet distinct, with subtle interplay between light and shadow.  Emin’s self-portrait studies in gouache are defined with a fluid, expressive line and, faces blanked and blotched, are at once heroic and vulnerable - the more so once they have been enlarged to the scale of the embroideries which are based on them.  It is a radical re-evaluation of the grand tradition of the female nude.