Glass previews Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul at the Royal Academy

THE ROYAL Academy presents Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul, a duo-exhibition that will exhibit the artists’ shared explorations of grief, loss and longing. The exhibition will comprise of a series of Emin’s works, including some unseen paintings, alongside a collection of watercolours and oils by Edvard Munch, celected by Emin.

The result is a visual conversation between Emin and the man whose work has inspired her own for years; her “favourite artist in the whole world”.

Tracey Emin, It didnt stop, I didnt stop, 2019, acrylic on canvas, Xavier Hufkins

Munch has been a lifelong inspiration of Emin’s; his works written into the fabric of her own. This is perhaps most explicitly illustrated in her winning submission for an international competition to procure a sculpture for Museum Island in Oslo, Norway: Emin constructed a nine metre high Mother for Munch.

Cast in 15 tonnes of brass, Mother echoes the bronze figures that will populate the RA exhibition, fleshy women that bear the mark of Emin’s hand as her paintings and script bear the scrawl of her brush.

This dialogue between larger-than-life physical sculpture and scribbled nude extends to the Munch pieces which will hang among them. The curve of a model’s spine, the tilt of her head, the wash of nudes and reds, the flicker of an agonised or pensive expression in a suggestion of paint, unite the works of Emin and her beloved Munch. The exhibition offers a simultaneous exploration of Emin’s recent work, and Munch’s archival pieces: an amalgamation which in turn enhances the experience of both.