“Art is like a lover whom you run away from but who comes back and picks you up.”
In 1999, Emin had her first solo exhibition in the United States at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, entitled Every Part of Me's Bleeding. Later that year, she was a Turner Prize nominee and exhibited My Bed – a readymade installation, consisting of her own unmade dirty bed, in which she had spent several weeks drinking, smoking, eating, sleeping and having sexual intercourse while undergoing a period of severe emotional flux. The artwork featured used condoms and blood-stained underwear.
Emin is also a panellist and speaker: she has lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (2010) the Royal Academy of Arts (2008),and the Tate Britain in London (2005) about the links between creativity and autobiography, and the role of subjectivity and personal histories in constructing art.
In December 2011, she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy;
In December 2020, Emin had a gallery exhibition containing works by Edvard Munch, entitled The Loneliness of the Soul, at the Royal Academy of Arts. Emin selected 19 pieces of Munch's work to be displayed alongside 25 pieces of her own. Simultaneously, she had a show at London's White Cube gallery which included a short Super-8 film in tribute to Munch.
The exhibition was re-shown at the newly opened Munch Museum in Oslo, with Emin being the first artist to show alongside the Norwegian painter. Works included recent paintings, as well as her seminal work My Bed. Emin had suffered from cancer in the year before the exhibit, and was unsure whether she would be able to see it herself..