Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940. Nickolas Muray Collection of Mexican Art, 666 Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas, Austin
Tracey Emin and Frida Kahlo have both created profoundly personal work that challenges the way we view art and talk about our inner lives. This year, both artists are having major solo shows at Tate Modern, opening this month and June respectively. These exhibitions highlight their bravery and raw innovation. While they never met – Emin grew up in Margate a decade after the Mexican painter’s death – their practices continue to resonate with one another across a century.
Also featuring the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, who shows at Tate Modern over the summer, the gallery has focused this year’s programming around ‘prominent and powerful female artists who have shaped art history’, says Catherine Wood, director of the gallery’s curatorial department, and its head curator. ‘Especially artists who have worked with their own personal life stories which were deeply affected by trauma.’
Kahlo’s paintings feature herself in settings that teeter between real life and surreal imagination, drawing upon her own experiences of heartbreak, sickness and miscarriage. In her famous work The Broken Column (1944), we see the artist topless except for a brace that wraps around her torso, showing a crumbling decorative architectural backbone through an exposed gap in her flesh. The piece was made following a devastating 1925 bus accident, which left Kahlo temporarily bed-bound before suffering lifelong pain. Her work was radical in its time, centring physical and psychological experiences that are universal yet frequently silenced. Through images rich with both beauty and tremendous suffering, she painted a complex and nuanced view of love and loss.
Emin’s early work can likewise be seen as ahead of its time in many ways. When she emerged onto the UK art scene in the 1990s as a YBA (Young British Artist), her brash yet sensitive works on sex and abortion drew outrage from certain sectors of the art world. Her appliquéd tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), featured the names of 102 bedfellows both sexual and platonic and was derided by the tabloid press. Like Kahlo, themes of heartache, shame and, more recently, sickness, permeate her paintings and installations. She even paid homage to her predecessor in Mary McCartney’s famous photograph Dame Tracey Emin as Frida Kahlo (2000). In it, Emin adopts Kahlo’s unique style, with giant red flowers woven through her hair, expressive jewellery and an instantly recognisable thick brow drawn above the bridge of her nose.
‘Both artists have opened up the possibility to draw upon personal experience as valid subject matter for art’
Tracey Emin, I never asked to Fall in Love - You made me Feel like this, 2018 © Tracey Emin
‘I think we are familiar with the fierceness and independence of each artist, as they are and were equally brave, outspoken and determined,’ says Wood. ‘But the spiritual affinities and tenderness towards their families might surprise visitors.’ While both artists developed a fierce form of self-expression that is palpable in their work, it wouldn’t be possible without a vulnerable, emotional openness – and a willingness to share this with their audience.
Autobiographical art, especially that produced by female artists, has historically been treated as less serious than the conceptual pieces of their male counterparts. ‘It was always the feminist mantra that “the personal is political”,’ says Wood, ‘but it’s true that autobiographical work was seen as less serious, less “universal” than abstract work by male artists in modernist Western art history.’ Today, there is a much stronger focus on the life of the artist, accelerated by a contemporary landscape that invites us to share our feelings and personal experiences online.
There are many contemporary artists who have followed in Kahlo and Emin’s footsteps, delving into their own lives as a way of speaking about wider life experiences. The former’s exhibition, The Making of an Icon, reflects on this with the inclusion of over 80 of her contemporaries and subsequent artists who have been inspired by her. ‘Both artists changed art history by refusing to take the passive position that the female body had been ascribed by art history,’ says Wood. ‘They have jointly opened up the possibility to draw upon personal experience as valid subject matter for art, even when it is material that people would usually try to hide or be ashamed of.’
Tracey Emin, 27 February 2026 until 31 August 2026, and Frida: The Making of an Icon, 25 June 2026 until 3 January 2027, Tate Modern