Dame Tracey Emin says male artists ‘peak’ in their 40s but women can ‘come and come and come’

‘Damien Hirst was like a force. And now he’s not,’ she said

Dame Tracey Emin says male artists peak in their forties, but women have the ability to create powerful works for their entire lives.

The Turner Prize-winning artist, 61, made the observation on The Louis Theroux podcast, describing her contemporary Damien Hirst, 59, as a man who was a force when he was young “and now he is not”.

Men “sort of peak in their forties”, while “women just tend to come and come and come and come and come, so as a woman, you carry on coming all your life until you’re old,” she continued.

Emin, who earlier this year spoke in-depth with Indepedent editor-in-chief Geordie Greig about her cancer diagnosis, told Theroux: “I think it’s really hard to be an artist. I think it’s really difficult. I think people who don’t make art or don’t attempt to be an artist, don’t understand how difficult it is to have that conviction, that self-belief and everything.

“Damien was a young artist that started off with a lot of that belief and a lot of that conviction. He was like a force. And now he’s not.”

Hirst famously won the Turner Prize in 1995 by preserving a cow and its calf in formaldehyde for his work ‘Mother and Child Divided’.

Emin, meanwhile, is best known for her works ‘Everyone I have Ever Slept With’ (1995) and ‘My Bed’ (1993), which caused controversy at the time of their release.

In a bid to illustrate her point that women can continue to create notable works into later life, she referred to Louise Bourgeois, a French artist best known for her large-scale sculpture work.

She continued to produce new pieces until her death at the age of 98 in 2010.

Tracey Emin used her recent cancer battle and the extensive surgery that followed as inspiration for several works. (Dave Benett/Getty Images)

Damien Hirst's Mother and Child Divided, an artwork comprised of a cow and calf bisected and suspended in formaldehyde, which won the 1995 Turner Prize, on show in the Tate Britain, London. (PA)

Emin said: “Like now, if you look [at the painter] Joan Mitchell, for example, she’s like undoubtedly one of the greatest American abstract painters ever, better than Jackson Pollock.”

Dame Tracey was recently honoured for her decades-long contribution to British art on the King’s birthday honours list.

Tracey Emin’s 1998 piece ‘My Bed’ on display at an auction house exhibition space in central London in 2014. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

The work ‘Everyone I have Ever Slept With’ featured the names of everyone the artist was intimate with until the time of its creation in 1995. (Stephen White)

Reacting to the honour, she said that she likes the “pomp and ceremony of the royal family” and believes they should be celebrated by a larger portion of the British public.

She added: “I would never, ever, ever want or wish to be part for royal family, when you see what they have to do and how they live and how restricted their lives are, I think it’s like a kind of living hell.”

She then touched upon her own brush with mortality, which began while she was painting a large, abstract malignant tumour. While creating, she is said to have discovered a tumour of her own and was subsequently diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2020.

The artist had to have extensive surgery as a result and has since used the experience to inspire several works, including a series of nude self-portraits, which were featured in the show ‘A Journey To Death’.

Tracey Emin had to have extensive surgery after being diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2020. (Getty Images)

She has spoken openly about acquiring a stoma bag from the surgery and said she brought it in a Victoria Beckham-designed bag when she became a dame.

Explaining her reasoning, Dame Tracey said: “The reason why I had to have my night bag plugged in and my shopping bag when we met the King is because these things take time and you don’t know how long it’s going to take for them to come down the stairs and the last thing I want to do is be standing there ready to meet the King and Queen and then have to beforehand rush to the loo or my bag burst.

“That would be really embarrassing.”