British artist Tracey Emin’s seminal installation “My Bed” 1998 is on show at the Tate Britain for the first time since the controversial work made headlines in 1999 when it was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. “My Bed” was made in Emin’s Waterloo council flat in 1998 and consists of the artist’s own bed covered in stained sheets, discarded condoms, underwear, as well as empty bottles of alcohol.In a 2001 episode of “The South Bank Show,” Emin explained the origins of the work. She said that at the time she was at a low point in her life: she had been in bed for four days, hadn’t eaten properly for weeks, and had been drinking like a fish.“I thought ‘If I don’t drink water soon, I’m going to die’ but I was in a weird nihilistic place where I thought if I die it doesn’t matter. But because I didn’t want to die I got up, and then fell over, and crawled to the kitchen and managed to get some tap water and then kinda crawled back,” she recalled.“When I looked at the room I thought ‘Ughh!’ it was disgusting – it was so vile what I was looking at- it seemed so incredibly ugly. But then when I looked again I saw all of these things out of that room in a different place in my head and I thought – ‘That’s closed, that’s finished’ and then once I had transported that death bed and took it somewhere else in my head it became something incredibly beautiful.”“My Bed” is being shown alongside six of the Emin’s recent figure drawings, which she has gifted to the nation to mark the occasion, as well as two works by Francis Bacon that she chose from the Tate’s collection. According to the Tate, the juxtaposition of Bacon’s “Study of a Dog” 1952 and “Reclining Woman” 1961 with “My Bed” is intended to generate a dialogue surrounding the different ways that the both artists’ works deal with turmoil and intense emotion.Follow @UK_ARTINFO
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