Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 3

Tracey Emin
Color photograph of the iconic 1998 My Bed (Hand signed by Tracey Emin), Framed

2017

$7,500
£5,695.36
€6,583.50
CA$10,540.54
A$11,736.87
CHF 6,206.74
MX$142,830.59
NOK 78,237.26
SEK 73,711
DKK 49,134.38

About the Item

Tracey Emin My Bed (Hand signed by Tracey Emin), 2017 Photographic print (hand signed and dated in black marker) Boldly signed in black marker on the front This work is elegantly framed under UV plexiglass A scarce collectible when hand signed Measurements: Framed 12 inches vertical by 14.25 inches horizontal by 1.25 inches Photograph 5 inches vertical x 7 inches horizontal Original, unique hand signed photograph of the most important and iconic work created by beloved British artist Tracey Emin - who catapulted to international superstardom in 1999 with the installation at the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, of her 1998 "My Bed" - which had been on loan to the Tate for a decade by Charles Saatchi. Consisting of Emin’s bed, dirty underwear, cigarette butts, empty vodka bottles, and boxes of contraceptive pills, crumpled tissues, period-stained clothing, a pregnancy test, lubricant, and condoms surrounded her bed. The artwork was created after the artist spent four days in her bed on a bender recovering from a breakup. If there's one iconic piece that most represents Tracey Emin's oeuvre - this is it. “Back in the 90s, it was all about cool Britannia and the shock factor and now I hope, years later, people will finally see it as a portrait of a younger woman and how time affects all of us. I am still very proud of it and I am grateful that the right person bought it.” – Tracey Emin My Bed was first displayed at the Tate in 1999 when it was nominated for the Turner prize. The polarizing work caused such a media frenzy that it pushed the gallery’s visitor numbers up to a record high. It was bought the following year for £150,000 by Charles Saatchi, an avid collector of YBA art. The piece then went on display at the Saatchi Gallery, then at County Hall London, and Saatchi is also said to have displayed the bed in his own dining room. My Bed has now been installed as part of the newly rehung displays of the Tate’s permanent collection. Emin herself was very involved in how the work was to be presented, and it sits in a gallery alongside two Francis Bacon paintings, his 1951 Study of a Dog and his 1961 Reclining Woman, as well as six of her drawings from 2014 that Emin gifted to the Tate to mark the occasion. It is to be the highlight of Tracey Emin’s much anticipated 2026 career retrospective at the Tate. About Tracey Emin: Self-portraiture and the nude run throughout her practice, which Emin has described as being about ‘rites of passage, of time and age, and the simple realisation that we are always alone’. Her earliest works refer to her family, childhood and chaotic teenage years, growing up in the seaside town of Margate and leaving home at the age of fifteen. What happened next is explored, in a manner that is neither tragic nor sentimental, in drawing, painting, film, photography, sewn appliqué, sculpture, neon and writing, as the vicissitudes of relationships, pregnancies and abortions intersect with her commitment to the formal disciplines of art. Most recently, the artist has experienced her body as a battleground, through illness and ageing, on which she reports with characteristic fearlessness. The playful title of Emin’s first solo exhibition, My Major Retrospective 1963–1993, suggests the artist felt, despite being at the beginning of her career, significant things had already happened. Her obsessive assemblage of personal memorabilia included tiny photographs of her art school paintings that she’d destroyed, a ‘photographic graveyard’ that revealed an admiration for paintings by Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch. She details this ‘emotional suiside’ in Tracey Emin’s CV Cunt Vernacular (1997), among several early video works that give further insight into her formation as an artist, highlighting moments of epiphany through the use of first-person narrative. ‘I realised there was the essence of creativity, that moment of conception,’ she says in How It Feels (1996), a pivotal film in which she tells the story of her abortion. ‘The whole being of everything… it had to be about where it was really coming from’. Speaking to camera while walking through the streets of London, she concludes that conceptual art, as an act of reproduction, is inseparable from the artist’s inner life. Developing this connection, the haunting film Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children (1998) shows the artist on the pier near Munch’s house, naked and prostrate in the foetal position, the dawn rising over the water as she lifts her head and screams – a guttural response to great painter’s iconic image. In 1998, Emin created My Bed, an uncensored presentation of her most personal habitat. The double bed has become abstracted from function as it sits on the gallery floor, in conversation with art history and a stage for life events: birth, sleep, sex, depression, illness, death. The accumulation of real objects (slippers, condoms, cigarettes, empty bottles, underwear) on and around the unmade bed builds a portrait of the artist with bracing matter-of-factness, defying convention to exhibit what most people would keep private. The work gained international attention as part of the Turner Prize, entering Emin into public consciousness. Another work that became a byword for her art of disclosure was the sculpture Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963−1995 (1995, destroyed 2004), where the names of all those she had ever shared a bed with – friends, lovers and family – were sewn on the inside of a tent, a crawl-space that invites the viewer to reflect on their own inventory. Explicitly feminist, and acknowledging the influence of her friend and collaborator Louise Bourgeois, Emin’s choice of medium is integral to the story she tells. In hand-embroidered blankets and quilts, traditionally associated with women’s work, she pierces the visual field with words, combining scraps of different material with uneven stitching to spell out statements whose syntax and spelling remain uncorrected. With titles such as  Mad Tracey from Margate. Everyone’s been there, (1997) or Helter Fucking Skelter (2001), they register the artist’s acute sensitivity to the views of those around her and give a riposte, just as the medium is a riposte to the classification of fine art, for centuries dominated by male artists. As she herself became newsworthy, both nationally and internationally, Emin used the publicity to prick other forms of decorum in the professional art world – such as never over-explaining. In longer form, her memoir, Strangeland (2005) offers an account of her journey to becoming ‘a fucked, crazy, anorexic-alcoholic-childless, beautiful woman. I never dreamt it would be like this.’ The text is riddled with spelling mistakes that challenge the form and carry through a sense of unfiltered process, as was also the case with her long-running newspaper column for The Independent (2005–09), in which she narrated her weekly goings-on under the title ‘My Life in a Column’. Emin’s ongoing series of neons features snatches of text in her recognisable slanted handwriting, elevating fleeting thoughts and feelings as aphorisms: You touch my Soul (2020), I Longed For you (2019) or I don’t Believe in Love but I believe in you (2012). Her formulation of statements in the second person has the effect of placing the viewer squarely in the situation, and can encapsulate an entire romance in a pithy phrase, as in I want my time with You (2018), a twenty-metre-wide neon that greets passengers at London’s St Pancras Station. A critical part of her practice since the 1990s, the neons evoke the seafront lights of Margate, latent with the sense of dusk and faded glamour. Her birthplace is an abiding subject; it resurfaces in large-scale sculptures, where reclaimed wood and found materials are assembled in jagged structures that allude to the beach, pier, huts and tide markers. Margate’s famous theme park ‘Dreamland’ is referred to in several works, among them Self-Portrait (2001), which recreates the pleasure ground’s helter-skelter, and It’s Not the Way I want to Die (2005), which recalls the undulating roller-coaster in rickety, worn wood, fragile to the point of collapse. Margate is ‘part of me’, Emin says, and while looking back she is now looking to the future with the establishment of TKE Studios, a new art school and artists’ studios. Questions of mortality and the centrality of the female reproductive body drive The Mother (2021), one of Emin’s most significant public sculptures. Permanently sited next to the new Munch Museum, Oslo, it marks the death of her own mother, and brings her lifelong admiration for Munch full circle. Fifteen tonnes of bronze standing nine metres high, this woman with ‘her legs open to the Fjord’ is visible from afar over land and water, a monument to the female figure as protector without compromising on her vulnerability or eroticism. By contrast, Baby Things, Emin’s accurate rendering of children’s tiny lost shoes and clothes in bronze, was installed as if by chance outside the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007) and around Folkestone Triennial (2008), intimate tokens that might inadvertently provoke a range of reactions, from fear for those we love most, to the indifference with which we treat a discarded object. Most recently, Emin’s work has been charged by the seriousness of her medical situation, since in 2020 she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Self-portraits taken on her camera phone in bed find the artist facing her ‘crippling’ insomnia in the small hours, and in recovery from extensive surgery. Her paintings of the nude figure have a tempestuous energy. Emin’s graphic line, by turn delicate or vigorous, imparts a sense of urgency; with each abandoned and assertive gesture, she is flaying herself open. Drips and obliterations point to the fluidity of the body, as it fluctuates between joy and suffering on its journey between birth and death. Explosions of colour allude to a self that is overcome by feeling and triumphing in sheer sensuality.  Tracey Emin was born in 1963 in London. She currently lives and works between London, the South of France, and Margate, UK. Emin has exhibited extensively including major exhibitions at Royal Academy of Arts, London (2020); Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2019); Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, France (2017); Leopold Museum, Vienna (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2013); Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2012); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2012); Hayward Gallery, London (2011); Kunstmuseum Bern (2009); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2008); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Malaga, Spain (2008); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2003); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002). In 2007 Emin represented Great Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale and her installation  My Bed has been included in ‘In Focus’ displays at Tate Britain with Francis Bacon (2015), Tate Liverpool with William Blake and also at Turner Contemporary, Margate alongside JMW Turner (2017). In 2011, Emin was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and in 2012 was made Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts.
  • Creator:
    Tracey Emin (1963, British)
  • Creation Year:
    2017
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 5 in (12.7 cm)Width: 7 in (17.78 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
    Excellent condition; ships framed.
  • Gallery Location:
    New York, NY
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU1745216776962

More From This Seller

View All
Jonas Wood, Interiors and Landscapes (Lt. Ed Hand signed and inscribed poster)
By Jonas Wood
Located in New York, NY
JONAS WOOD Interiors and Landscapes Offset lithograph poster (hand signed and inscribed) 24 × 18 inches Hand signed, dated by Jonas Wood with the artist's distinctive basketball leg...
Category

2010s Contemporary Interior Prints

Materials

Permanent Marker, Lithograph, Offset

Jonas Wood, Jersey City apartment (Hand Signed twice by Jonas Wood) Manhattan NY
By Jonas Wood
Located in New York, NY
JONAS WOOD Interiors, 2019 Offset lithograph in colors on wove paper Signed TWICE: Signed and dated in black marker lower right with the artist's distinctive flourish; hand signed ag...
Category

2010s Contemporary Figurative Prints

Materials

Permanent Marker, Lithograph, Offset

Venice Biennale: XLIV Esposizione Internazionale D'arte (Hand signed by Kapoor)
By Anish Kapoor
Located in New York, NY
Rare collectors' item: Anish Kapoor Venice Biennale: XLIV Esposizione Internazionale D'arte Biennale Di Venezia (Hand signed and inscribed by Anish Kapoor), 1990 HISTORIC signed poster published on the occasion of Kapoor representing Great Britain at the Venice Biennale Offset lithograph poster (Hand signed, inscribed to Nadine and dated 2016) Boldly signed, inscribed and dated by Anish Kapoor on the lower right front 33 × 23 inches Unframed Boldly signed and inscribed by Anish Kapoor on the lower right front for the present owner, Nadine, so provenance is direct. Accompanied by gallery issued Certificate of Guarantee This offset lithograph poster was published on the occasion of Anish Kapoor's exhibition "XLIV Esposizione Internazionale D'Arte" at the Biennale Di Venezia from May 27 to September 30, 1990. Hand signed posters by Kapoor are quite elusive. The poster is two sided as it was published on the occasion of the artist's participation in the 1990 Venice Biennale (the verso has his lengthy biography), and it bears the original folds as issued. British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor was chosen to represent Britain at the first Biennale of the 1990s. He had been exhibiting since 1980 but it was this show that brought him widespread recognition on the international stage. Sixteen huge sandstone blocks dominated the Pavilion’s main room; they were so heavy that the floor had to be reinforced with supports. Kapoor had started working in stone in the late 1980s and each block in Void Field (1989) has a hole filled with another motif in his work, the powdered blue pigment used in Indian religious ceremonies. The same vibrant tones, which was also inspired also by Yves Klein’s statement bold blue colour, were used in his low-lying slate sculpture, A Wing at the Heart of Things (1990), in the back gallery of the Pavilion; this work is now part of Tate’s collection. “Venice is an interchange of East and West, reflecting the way Kapoor borrows from both cultures” said Henry Meyric Hughes, British Council. Kapoor’s exhibition also wove together references to spiritualism and eroticism, with the red slit in the Pavilion's wall, entitled The Healing of St. Thomas (1989), alluding to the saint that doubted Jesus’ resurrection...
Category

1990s Contemporary Interior Prints

Materials

Lithograph, Offset

Lt Ed Gagosian Gallery Exhibition Poster (Hand Signed Basketball by Jonas Wood)
By Jonas Wood
Located in New York, NY
Jonas Wood Prints (Hand signed), 2018 Offset lithograph poster. Hand signed and dated with basketball flourish. 30 × 24 inches Edition of approx. 100 signed (un-numbered) Boldly sign...
Category

2010s Contemporary Interior Prints

Materials

Offset

Forged Rounds, Gagosian gallery exhibition poster, Hand signed by Richard Serra
By Richard Serra
Located in New York, NY
Richard Serra Forged Rounds (hand signed), 2019 Offset lithograph poster (hand signed by Richard Serra) 26 × 40 inches Boldly signed in black marker on the front by Richard Serra Unframed Acquired from Gagosian Gallery, New York City From Gagosian Gallery about Serra's Forged Rounds project: Weight is a value for me—not that it is any more compelling than lightness, but I simply know more about weight than about lightness and therefore I have more to say about it, more to say about the balancing of weight, the diminishing of weight, the addition and subtraction of weight, the concentration of weight, the rigging of weight, the propping of weight, the placement of weight, the locking of weight, the psychological effects of weight, the disorientation of weight, the disequilibrium of weight, the rotation of weight, the movement of weight, the directionality of weight, the shape of weight. —Richard Serra Gagosian is pleased to present recent sculptures and drawings by Richard Serra. At 980 Madison Avenue, a series of new diptych and triptych drawings...
Category

2010s Minimalist Abstract Prints

Materials

Lithograph, Offset, Permanent Marker

Howard Kanovitz S/N lithograph by famed photorealist artist for The Paris Review
By Howard Kanovitz
Located in New York, NY
Howard Kanovitz Paris Review, 1968 Lithograph on wove paper 33 × 26 inches Pencil signed and numbered 9/200 Published by The Paris Review, New Y...
Category

1960s Photorealist Interior Prints

Materials

Lithograph

You May Also Like

Dahlia II - Large Contemporary Photographic Print from Unique Color Polaroid
By Pia Clodi
Located in Zürich, CH
Part of the BLOOMY VIEW series taken in Bern 2020 in collaboration with Heym Collections, the images gained new life in their ambiguity, which often stimulates the viewer to project ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Figurative Photography

Materials

Photographic Film, Photographic Paper, Carbon Pigment, Polaroid

Picasso at Vauvenargues 1962 by David Douglas Duncan
Located in San Francisco, CA
David Douglas Duncan: 1916-2018. Well listed photographer who had rare access to Picasso. He took numerous photos of the master at work, and at pl...
Category

1960s Figurative Photography

Materials

Offset

Clearance Sale
By Colette Lumiere
Located in New York, NY
Rare photolithograph by Colette.
Category

1970s Figurative Photography

Materials

Lithograph

Hallelujah - large format photograph of baroque Italian palazzo fresco ceiling
By Frank Schott
Located in San Francisco, CA
mesmerizing baroque architectural details in a long forgotten Italian palazzo discovered in Mediterranean Sicily, Italy Hallelujah by Frank Schott 40...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Color Photography

Materials

Archival Ink, Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, Archival Pigment, Giclée

Zeppelin (framed) - monumental photograph of iconic pioneering airship in hangar
By Christian Stoll
Located in San Francisco, CA
large format photograph of iconic zeppelin in aircraft hangar Zeppelin by Christian Stoll ( framed ) "Modern Gallery Frameless" 48 x 69 inches (122c...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Color Photography

Materials

Photographic Paper, Plexiglass, Archival Paper, Giclée, Archival Pigment

Pantheon ( Rome ) - large scale photograph of iconic architectural elements
By Frank Schott
Located in San Francisco, CA
Pantheon (Rome) by Frank Schott from a series of monochromatic and timeless photographic observances of iconic architectural and interior references around Rome's historical center ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Black and White Photography

Materials

Archival Ink, Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, Giclée