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Tracey EminMe + Paul We Are the Trolls (famous monoprint from Douglas Cramer's collection)1995
1995
About the Item
Tracey Emin
Me + Paul We Are the Trolls, 1995
Monoprint on paper
Signed, titled and dated in graphite pencil on the front
Frame included
Measurements:
Framed (original vintage frame included)
15.5 inches vertical by 20.5 by .75 inches
Work
11.5 inches vertical by 16.5 inches horizontal
Provenance:
The Collection of Douglas S. Cramer, USA
Hubert S. Bush Collection USA (with label)
Jay Jopling, London (with label) - Jay Jopling is the legendary founder of White Cube Gallery
This early (1995) monoprint is part of Tracey Emin's "troll" series, depicting her younger self and her (now estranged) twin brother Paul as children with sometimes murderous thoughts. It was acquired from the collection of Douglas Cramer, (August 22, 1931 – June 4, 2021) a top American television producer who worked for Paramount Television and Spelling Television, producing series such as Mission: Impossible, The Brady Bunch, and Dynasty - who amassed one of the most distinguished collections of contemporary art in the United States.
A 2011 Daily Mail article entitled "If you Think Tracey Emin is Wild, say Hello to her Terrible Twin" describes a different monotype, also from the troll series, that Tracey gave to her brother Paul, which he promptly and publicly sold on a TV show, much to her chagrin. The article reads:
"Yet there is one person central to Tracey's life who has managed to stay largely shielded from the public eye: her twin brother Paul.. He leads a life that could hardly be more different to Tracey's. She is worth millions, is a household name, owns an estate in the South of France and has A-list friends such as Kate Moss, Orlando Bloom and David Bowie. Meanwhile, at the age of 47, Paul Emin is an unemployed carpenter who suffers from epilepsy and survives on benefits. Worse still, he is on bad terms with Tracey, thanks to a rare and possibly ill-judged public appearance. This week he will appear on television to sell one of his treasured possessions - a picture by his sister - in an attempt to raise enough cash to emigrate. 'She went a bit wild when she found out and we haven't really spoken since,' says Paul who, like Tracey, is generously tattooed. He will not be paying a visit to her current exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, which is hardly surprising given what happened when he attended one of Tracey's earlier exhibitions. After enjoying the lavish hospitality, he fell on to one of her pieces and destroyed it. Paul and Tracey's lives have been unusually close. Born on July 3, 1963, in Margate, Kent, they shared a cot. After enjoying the lavish hospitality, he fell on to one of her pieces and destroyed it. Paul says: 'I remember getting really drunk and having a dance with Kate Moss.
'On another night, I went to her private launch at the White Cube gallery in Hoxton. I had a few beers before we went inside and then hit the wine and champagne. I remember talking to Janet Street-Porter and David Walliams. 'The next thing I knew the wine had hit me and I had fallen over onto one of Tracey's neons (light displays). I got the biggest electric shock of my life as it went pop and I went zap. I landed at David's feet. Luckily Tracey saw the funny side. It soon sobered me up.'
However, Paul's partying lifestyle came to a sudden halt in December 2007 when he had a serious accident while working as a carpenter near Cardiff. He fell 30ft down a ladder and landed on his head. He fractured his neck and was later diagnosed with epilepsy. He admits: 'Sometimes I go to bed and I wake up on the floor. I lose control of my body. It's not a pretty sight.'
Tracey was concerned about Paul's situation, particularly since his relationship with his girlfriend collapsed soon afterwards and his money ran out. ...'I haven't been back to work since. It's been a burden - I was used to earning £1,000 a week - but I've managed to struggle through on disability benefits. I've had to put my partying days behind me as I'm on so much medication. 'Tracey is very generous - I have borrowed money from her in the past. But I cannot keep asking her to bail me out. We have had periods before when we haven't spoken as we are both strong characters. But I am very proud of her, and I love her more than anything in the world.' Paul, who describes his past as 'pretty wild', agrees he has felt the effects of own dysfunctional childhood. He says he has never been in a relationship that lasted more than four years and has had three children with three different women."
More 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.
- Courtesy of White Cube Gallery
- Creator:Tracey Emin (1963, British)
- Creation Year:1995
- Dimensions:Height: 15.5 in (39.37 cm)Width: 20.5 in (52.07 cm)Depth: 0.75 in (1.91 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:Not examined outside of the original frame but appears to be in very good condition with some gentle waviness.
- Gallery Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU1745213442972
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