Love is What You Want

Love Is What You Want is the catalogue for Tracey Emin's 2011 retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery. It was the first survey to bring her sculpture, drawing, painting, text pieces, photography, video, and performance together under one roof.

Hayward Gallery Publishing released the 260-page book alongside the show, curated by Ralph Rugoff, with essays by Michael Corris, Jennifer Doyle, Cliff Lauson, and Ali Smith. Emin has built her work around the most exposed details of her own life since emerging in the early 1990s as part of the Young British Artists. The pieces gathered here range from the confrontational and sexually explicit to the plainly confessional, running through her recurring concerns with relationships, class, spirituality, and fame. The essays place that body of work against feminist art's insistence that the personal is political, and track the wit that runs under even her bleakest pieces.

Emin came up alongside Damien Hirst and the other Young British Artists in the early 1990s. Pieces like Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 and My Bed made her one of the most recognized and controversial artists of that generation. By the time of this show she had moved well beyond the shock value of those early works into painting, bronze, and neon text pieces. The Hayward retrospective was the first attempt to show that full range together.