Tracey Emin curates 'Crossing into Darkness' at Carl Freedman Gallery in Margate

Tracey Emin has curated an exhibition, Crossing into Darkness, at the Carl Freedman Gallery in Margate. Emin mounted the show "for the depths of winter" and, by what the review calls a stroke of lighting genius, the gallery has been plunged into nocturnal shadow that still lets you see the art.

The display brings together works by artists Emin nurtures at her Margate studios alongside figures she calls her heroes, including Edvard Munch and Louise Bourgeois. Pieces range from Antony Gormley’s concrete waistcoat, cast from himself, to Munch’s 1895 self-portrait and Bourgeois’s wailing, stuffed head displayed in a vitrine.

Resident artist Joline Kwakkenbos contributes three striking paintings, including Self-Portrait as a Painter as Lucretia. Other responses to Emin’s sombre theme include Lindsey Mendick’s glazed ceramic busts of decomposing women, Laura Footes’s allegorical painting featuring a Baconian screaming mouth, a performance relic by Hermann Nitsch scored with real blood, and Anselm Kiefer’s hammer-and-anvil vitrine labelled "Thor." The show also pairs Johnnie Shand Kydd’s dawn landscapes with Georg Baselitz’s 1967 Ein Werktätiger, and ends with a Gilbert & George image that, Emin tells the reviewer, makes her think of the gates of hell.

Key Topics

Culture, Tracey Emin, Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, Edvard Munch, Louise Bourgeois