Evans is a place on Earth: Beds Are Burning:Tracey Emin at The White Cube, Bermondsey.

Beds are pretty central to our life. Most of us will spend about a third of our life in bed, most of us were conceived in a bed, most of us were born in a bed, and most of us will die in a bed. I've been in my bed twice today already and I'll be in it again later too. Probably with a hot water bottle. That's how I'm rolling right now.

Beds are pretty central to art too - as well that might be as art, more often than not, aspires to an imitation of life and when you think of beds in art which artists come to mind? A Guardian feature from back in 2014 listed the ten 'best' beds in art and they include the beds in paintings by Van Gogh, Titian, Rauschenberg, Delacroix, Munch, and Piero della Francesca. The newest, and perhaps untidiest, bed in that list was Tracey Emin's unmaded My Bed from 1998.

A representation of Emin's bed from a time when she was suffering from depression, not getting out of said bed, and not eating. Though she was drinking and we're not talking Diet 7-Up. The bed caused a stir at the time and was eventually sold by Christie's for £2,546,500. I'd sell my bed for that.

Take Me to Heaven (2024)

Emin's current show, I Followed You To The End - at Bermondsey's rather lovely White Cube gallery, dispenses with actual beds but it's got a lot of representations of beds and, in many of them, it seems that there are even worse, more unpleasant, things going on in them than people getting drunk and sinking into depression. And getting drunk and sinking into depression isn't that pleasant, I can tell you from bitter personal experience.

Sometimes Emin's figure, herself one tends to presume with this artist, is alone and sometimes she has company. Sometimes that company does not look particularly welcome. The blood red tones, the hints of menstruation, the violent scrawls, and the almost wholly abstract expressionism in some works suggests not just a disturbed mind, but a disturbed body.

None of the works (except a video - Tears of Blood, yes it lives up to the name - at the end) have been given a title and that's a pity because Tracey Emin is good at titles (the titles I have included here were found on the White Cube's website several hours after attending the show). Her titles tend towards the emo but they do give pointers as to the meaning of her work. Without the titles, we're mostly in the dark but that's not necessarily a problem. It means you engage with the work more directly.

Which is not always comfortable and, one imagines, is not meant to be either. Even if the titles regularly reference love and, in one case, heaven. The online bumf suggests Emin is taking a journey through loss, love, mortality, and rebirth and that she's exploring life's "most profound and intimate moments, with renewed intensity".

Which, to be fair, she is. As ever with Emin the work is often so personal you'd need to have lived her life, or at least shared a significant part of it, to truly understand what she's getting at but it'd be a disingenuous observer who would say she's anything but brave in putting these brutally personal images and thoughts front and centre of her art.

Visceral, flirting with body horror in places, the paintings feature a lot of boobs, the odd growler, and, Emin's trademark, some fairly frank text. Not least in work which features the bold and stark graffiti style message, rendered in red of course, I DON'T WANT TO HAVE SEX BECAUSE MY BODY FEELS DEAD.

Another Place to Live (2024)

I Followed You to the End (2024)

I Followed you to the end (2024)

There are a few more comforting images amongst all the chaos. There's a cat by the side of one of the beds, the odd bedside cabinet or chest of drawers, and, in one image, there seems to be some pylons in the background. I love a pylon but, more so, it suggests Emin has actually got out of her not so lazy bed and ventured outside.

It's good for you, you know. There's a couple of bronze sculptures too. Ascension is an armless, headless torso that does have legs and the more startling, and much larger, I Followed You to the End, is similar but appears to show a woman, presumably Emin herself or part of her - there are bits missing, bent over in a position that Morrissey may once have called 'wide to receive'.

Lots of the works in the this show, as in Emin's wider work, show women at their most vulnerable but also, paradoxically, at their strongest. They show images of women that will make some men uncomfortable (I'll 'fess up, the sixty minute Tears of Blood video made me pretty uncomfortable).

Emin is on record with her admiration for Edvard Munch (there was even an exhibition that combined the two artists at the Royal Academy back in 2021) but I also saw, in this show, parallels with the late great Philip Guston. Guston famously, and controversially, turned his back on abstract expressionism to make figurative, politically satirical works and if Emin's paintings are only political with a lower case 'p' then they do seem to come from somewhere between Guston's abstract phase and his figurative era.

I Waited So Long - Too Long (2024)

The End of Love (2024)

There IS a lot of repetition in the show (I suppose getting into, and out of, bed is a fairly repetitive part of life but it says something that I was excited to see a painting that was set in a bath tub, rather than a bed) and the colour red becomes almost so dominant at points that you suspect you've accidentally wandered on to the set of a Dario Argento film (the blue of More Love Than I can Remember acted almost as a palate cleanser), and Emin's habit of randomly capitalising, or not, her titles remains frustrating, yet endearingly singular, for this orthographical stickler.

But none of those things are really a problem. When you enter Tracey Emin's world (and you don't have to pay for the privilege - I suspect both Emin and the White Cube are doing okay for money) you enter it on her terms and that's the best way to do it. If somebody is opening their soul, and - in a way - their body, to you you don't complain about how they do it. You accept it as it is. Tracey Emin's art may not always be the art we want but, just maybe, it's the art we need. I followed this show right to the end.