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Tracey Emin has stirred controversy as well as acclaim since she rose to fame as the most highly publicised of the infamous Young British Artists. Though denounced by conservative critics at the outset, Emin’s work has attracted serious critical attention since the early 1990s for being consistently engaging, original, and startlingly direct. Her work has succeeded over the years in many media–from films to appliques, embroideries, and installations–but it is in her works on paper that the honesty and frankness that have come to characterise her work are most fully realised. Edited by the artist herself from an archive of work stretching back before the beginnings of her career in the late 1980s, A Thousand Drawings is at once a collection of Emin’s works on paper, an expose of her life as an artist, and a collectible artifact in itself. Many of these works on paper shed light on well-known multimedia pieces, previously studied in Works 1963-2006, published by Rizzoli in 2006. Stripped of the distractions of form and context, her bare and enigmatic drawings are presented on bible-thin paper in a uniquely beautiful slipcased volume, with an introduction by the artist. From considered self-portraits to pen-and-ink drawings and informal studies on lined notebook paper, this remarkable collection is as much a catalogue of Emin’s preoccupations as it is a monument to her raw and evocative talents as an artist.
