Tracey Emin's Intimate Confrontation with Illness at Lorcan O'Neill Gallery in Rome

Tracey Emin (born 1963, London) returns to Lorcan O'Neill Gallery in Rome with the exhibition 'You Should Have Saved Me', presenting deeply confessional works that confront her recent cancer diagnosis and its aftermath. The show features paintings and drawings that layer autobiographical references, including her urostomy and self-imposed sexual abstinence, rendered in a diachronically stratified pictorial matter. The titular work, 'You Should Have Saved Me', serves as a manifesto, echoing Edvard Munch's 'Puberty' and suggesting a critique of her earlier piece 'You Saved Me' (2012). Other works revisit themes from her career, such as 'The Crucifixion', which underscores her struggle as a female painter in a male-dominated field, and references to 'My Bed'. The exhibition explores bodily precarity, emotional scars, and the meditative process of painting as a form of care.