Tracey Emin — I Need Art Like I Need God
Jay Jopling / London, 1998
Published for Tracey Emin: I Need Art Like I Need God, South London Gallery, 16 April–18 May 1997
Softcover exhibition monograph with stiff glossy wraps
73 pp., colour plates
30 × 21 cm / large quarto
Language: English
Condition: Very good overall. Light rubbing, handling marks, faint surface wear to glossy covers, minor edge/corner wear, original rear price/barcode sticker present. Interior clean and bright.
Printed support for an exhibition already moving beyond exhibition status.
Before My Bed became the public shorthand, this book fixes an earlier arrangement: body, room, handwriting, photograph, confession, object. The cover stages the artist from behind, inside the workspace, already converted into image and signature. The back cover reduces the body further: four small vertical fragments set into a field of turquoise, with the shop label still attached.
Inside, the sequence continues as document and display. Clothes, blankets, studio floor, handwritten notes, framed fragments, street images, hotel paper. Nothing is outside the work once it enters the catalogue. Biography becomes layout. Intimacy becomes plate. Evidence becomes style.
The book does not explain Emin. It files her.
A catalogue as exhibition residue.
A self-portrait routed through paper.
An object from the construction of a public name.
Shipping included in the listed price.
