Harry Weller on Tracey Emin at White Cube Paris | White Cube
British contemporary artist Tracey Emin presents a new exhibition at White Cube Gallery in Paris, bringing her unflinching emotional honesty to one of the most closely watched stages in the art world. Known for work that turns private experience into public art, Emin returns with a body of work that feels as raw and personal as anything in her celebrated career.
Harry Weller, Creative Director of Tracey Emin Studio, offers insight into the thinking behind the show, describing “ideas of love, longing and absence” as the themes at its core. They are subjects Emin has returned to throughout her career, and here they are explored with renewed depth and vulnerability. Absence becomes as present as any image on the wall, and longing is given form through gesture, line, and colour.
Paris provides a fitting setting for the exhibition, a city with its own long relationship to romance, memory, and loss. In the White Cube space, Emin’s work invites visitors to slow down and sit with feelings that are rarely spoken aloud. It is an exhibition that asks nothing of its audience except honesty, and offers the same in return.
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Harry Weller, Creative Director of Tracey Emin Studio, discusses the ideas of love, longing and absence that shape Tracey Emin’s exhibition at White Cube Paris.
Responding to the domestic character of White Cube Paris, the paintings and small-scale sculptures unfold as a sequence of intimate vignettes that chart the emotional terrain of love through passages of togetherness and estrangement. Invariably autobiographical and rendered in Emin’s recognisably loose, animated mark making, the works return to the private sphere of the bedroom, where the nude subject is encountered amid states of physical vulnerability and psychic unrest.
In this film, Harry reflects on the exhibition’s title, which collapses past, present and future into a continuous sense of longing. He considers the intimate scale of the paintings, the role of memory and spontaneous brushwork, and how the recurring presence of Tracey’s cats introduces another form of love, grounded in comfort and companionship.
As Harry reflects: ‘There's a vulnerability throughout, but also a tenderness, a resilience, and a persistent desire for connection.’
📍 Tracey Emin’s exhibition ‘I will miss you Yesterday / I will miss you Today / I will miss you Tomorrow / And that's how it will Always be’ is on view until 18 December 2026 at White Cube Paris.
