Tracey Emin: I Need Tomorrow, New Lithographs and Tate Modern's 2026 Retrospective

Tracey Emin’s latest work is not asking for immortality. It is asking for tomorrow.

Her new print series, I Need tomorrow, landed at the London Original Print Fair in May 2026 while Tate Modern’s major retrospective of her career, Tracey Emin: A Second Life, continues its run across the river. The timing is not accidental. It is a conversation between an artist looking back across her whole body of work and the same artist insisting, through new marks on stone, that she is not finished yet.

What makes this pairing so striking is the tension between the two projects. The retrospective is a gathering: four decades of painting, sculpture, neon, textile, video, and drawing, pulled together into one institutional frame. The prints are something else entirely. They are small, recent, and raw. They do not summarise a career. They extend it.

The news

Emin has released a series of six new lithographs titled I Need tomorrow, shown at the London Original Print Fair at Somerset House in May 2026. The prints were produced in collaboration with Counter Studio in Margate, in editions of 50. The series explores themes of intimacy, recovery, love, and self-reflection, rendered in Emin’s characteristically urgent, handwritten visual language.

Counter Studio, based in Emin’s adopted home town of Margate, has a track record of working with artists whose practices are rooted in gesture and material sensitivity. The collaboration matters. Lithography is a process that demands trust between artist and printer; the stone holds the image, but the pull requires precision, timing, and a willingness to let the medium push back.

Running alongside the prints is Emin’s Tate Modern retrospective, Tracey Emin: A Second Life, open from 27 February to 31 August 2026. The exhibition brings together work across painting, installation, sculpture, neon, textile, video, and drawing. It is the most comprehensive institutional survey of Emin’s practice to date, and it arrives at a moment when the conversation around her work has shifted significantly from spectacle towards substance.

Survival, not spectacle

The obvious story is: famous British artist makes new prints while her major retrospective is open. The better story is that Emin is using printmaking not as nostalgia, but as survival technology.

That sounds dramatic because it is. Emin was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2020 and now lives with the physical consequences of surgery. The title I Need tomorrow carries a sharper emotional charge when you know that context. These are not prints about looking back. They are prints about the stubborn, intimate, bodily act of continuing.

There is a particular kind of courage in making work that says “I am still here” without flinching. Emin has never been an artist who softens the message for comfort. Her early career was built on exposure: the tent, the bed, the raw confessional drawings that made tabloid editors both horrified and grateful. But that framing was always too simple, and the retrospective gives room to reassess it properly.

Critics have argued that A Second Life is not only about surviving cancer, but about surviving her own reputation and the old media framing of her as merely “confessional.” The word “confessional” has followed Emin for thirty years, and it has always been inadequate. Confession implies guilt, or at least the need to be absolved. Emin’s work does not ask for absolution. It asks to be witnessed.

Her practice turns private damage into public form. That is not confession. That is transformation. And the new lithographs continue that work with a directness that feels earned rather than performed.

Why printmaking matters here

Printmaking matters in this context because it is intimate and repeatable. A print is not a single untouchable object locked behind gallery glass and auction-house prices. It exists in multiples, but still carries touch, gesture, pressure, and trace. A lithograph is a contradiction in the best way: personal, but reproducible; fragile, but shareable; intimate, but not trapped in one place.

There is also something democratic about an edition of 50. It is not a unique painting destined for a single collector’s wall. It is not an installation that can only be experienced in one room for a limited run. Fifty prints can go to fifty different places, carry the same image into fifty different lives. For work that deals so directly with the need to persist, the medium is doing part of the talking.

For an artist whose recent years have been shaped by illness and recovery, the act of pressing an image into existence over and over again carries its own quiet defiance. Each print says the same thing the title does: I need tomorrow. And another one after that.

A second life, in more ways than one

For those of us who spend time in virtual worlds, the phrase A Second Life carries another resonance entirely. It suggests not only survival after illness, but the possibility of rebuilding the self through another form, another space, another version of presence. Emin’s retrospective title, whether intentionally or not, opens a door into questions about digital identity, virtual embodiment, and art as a way of continuing beyond the limits of the physical body.

Virtual spaces have long offered people the chance to exist differently: to build, create, exhibit, and connect in ways that are not bound by geography, mobility, or the constraints of a body that may not cooperate. The idea of a second life, whether capitalised or not, is fundamentally about the refusal to accept that one version of existence is all there is. Emin’s work has always carried that same refusal, expressed through paint and stone and neon rather than pixels and code, but the impulse is recognisable.

That bridge is not forced. It is simply there. And it is worth walking across.