.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Over two metres in height, A certain degree of anger is a monumental painting dating from a pivotal moment in Tracey Emin’s practice. A vast female nude looms large before a turreted tower, her face veiled in black. Clouds of red and pink billow across the canvas; liquid rivulets of pigment drip down its length. Painted in 2016, the work belongs to the extraordinary body of art created following the death of Emin’s mother that year. In her state of mourning, the artist vowed to commit herself anew to painting: a medium through which she felt best able to transmit the emotions of loss and yearning she was experiencing at the time. The resulting canvases, made largely during a solitary retreat to France, are infused with the raw pain of longing and absence. The present work’s title, in particular, captures the physical frenzy that characterises Emin’s painterly process, and which took on new potency during this period of grief.
Emin describes feeling ‘completely numbed’ after her mother passed away in the autumn. She declared that she no longer wanted to make anything ‘remotely conceptual. I didn’t want to make anything that wasn’t touched by me’. The paintings produced over the course of about a year in France—a period of catharsis that she describes as ‘really, really fantastic’—were exhibited in 2017 under the title The Memory of Your Touch (T. Emin, quoted in J. Higgie, ‘The Wound and the Healing’, Tracey Emin: Paintings, London 2024, pp. 10-11). The phrase was inspired by a scene in D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), in which Clifford Chatterley’s nurse, Mrs Bolton, describes the sorrow of not being able to recall her late husband’s touch. In grappling with this very feeling, Emin filled her canvases with her own physical presence. Her figures, modelled largely on herself, come to life through the visceral immediacy of her mark-making, every inch of the surface tingling with the trace of her flesh.
This was not the first time in Emin’s practice that painting had emerged as a vehicle for healing. As a young woman, she had struggled with the medium during pregnancy, recalling the nausea induced by the smell of turpentine. In the years following her subsequent abortion, the act of painting dredged up deep-seated feelings of guilt and failure. In 1996, determined to vanquish these demons, Emin took radical action, locking herself in a gallery in Sweden for three weeks and painting—naked—before a live audience. This extraordinary work, titled Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, allowed her to reconnect with the medium in new and unexpected ways. If the present work marked a turning point in her relationship with painting, a further milestone would come four years later in 2020. As she recovered from a devastating cancer diagnosis, the act of putting brush to canvas provided her with a much-needed emotional and physical outlet, giving rise to major works including Like a Cloud of Blood (2022).
Emin has spoken at length of her debts to Expressionism. As a teenager she discovered the work of Egon Schiele on the covers of David Bowie albums; as an undergraduate she wrote a thesis entitled ‘My Man Munch’. Her candid, self-referential figures—exhibited opposite both masters within the last decade—are deeply rooted in this tradition. So, too, is the convulsive physical energy that she brings to the canvas: the present work, she explains, started life ‘in a kind of mad sort of frenzy’ (T. Emin, video tour of the exhibition The Memory of Your Touch, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels 2017). At the same time, however, the work also bears witness to a host of other influences—from the lyrical abstract gestures of Cy Twombly, Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, to the Renaissance masters whom Emin admired during student pilgrimages to the National Gallery. Painting’s purpose, for her, ultimately transcends historical boundaries, offering a universal means of picturing what it means to be human.
Emin describes feeling ‘completely numbed’ after her mother passed away in the autumn. She declared that she no longer wanted to make anything ‘remotely conceptual. I didn’t want to make anything that wasn’t touched by me’. The paintings produced over the course of about a year in France—a period of catharsis that she describes as ‘really, really fantastic’—were exhibited in 2017 under the title The Memory of Your Touch (T. Emin, quoted in J. Higgie, ‘The Wound and the Healing’, Tracey Emin: Paintings, London 2024, pp. 10-11). The phrase was inspired by a scene in D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), in which Clifford Chatterley’s nurse, Mrs Bolton, describes the sorrow of not being able to recall her late husband’s touch. In grappling with this very feeling, Emin filled her canvases with her own physical presence. Her figures, modelled largely on herself, come to life through the visceral immediacy of her mark-making, every inch of the surface tingling with the trace of her flesh.
This was not the first time in Emin’s practice that painting had emerged as a vehicle for healing. As a young woman, she had struggled with the medium during pregnancy, recalling the nausea induced by the smell of turpentine. In the years following her subsequent abortion, the act of painting dredged up deep-seated feelings of guilt and failure. In 1996, determined to vanquish these demons, Emin took radical action, locking herself in a gallery in Sweden for three weeks and painting—naked—before a live audience. This extraordinary work, titled Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, allowed her to reconnect with the medium in new and unexpected ways. If the present work marked a turning point in her relationship with painting, a further milestone would come four years later in 2020. As she recovered from a devastating cancer diagnosis, the act of putting brush to canvas provided her with a much-needed emotional and physical outlet, giving rise to major works including Like a Cloud of Blood (2022).
Emin has spoken at length of her debts to Expressionism. As a teenager she discovered the work of Egon Schiele on the covers of David Bowie albums; as an undergraduate she wrote a thesis entitled ‘My Man Munch’. Her candid, self-referential figures—exhibited opposite both masters within the last decade—are deeply rooted in this tradition. So, too, is the convulsive physical energy that she brings to the canvas: the present work, she explains, started life ‘in a kind of mad sort of frenzy’ (T. Emin, video tour of the exhibition The Memory of Your Touch, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels 2017). At the same time, however, the work also bears witness to a host of other influences—from the lyrical abstract gestures of Cy Twombly, Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, to the Renaissance masters whom Emin admired during student pilgrimages to the National Gallery. Painting’s purpose, for her, ultimately transcends historical boundaries, offering a universal means of picturing what it means to be human.