A series of self-portraits created by Tracey Emin following major cancer surgery has renewed critical attention on how artists depict illness, disability and bodily trauma through autobiographical work, drawing comparisons with the intensely personal paintings of Frida Kahlo.

Among the works attracting renewed discussion is a photographic self-portrait Emin took after being diagnosed with squamous cell bladder cancer in 2020. In the image, the artist photographs herself in a hospital mirror while partially shielding her chest with an iPhone.

The composition also shows medical devices associated with her treatment, including a catheter and urostomy bag, following surgery that resulted in the removal of several organs, including her bladder, uterus, ovaries and parts of her colon and vagina.The image has been interpreted by critics and viewers as part of Emin’s longstanding practice of confronting audiences with physical vulnerability and intimate bodily realities.

Despite the medical context, the work is marked by direct visual confrontation rather than retreat, continuing themes that have shaped Emin’s career since the 1990s.Following surgery, Emin publicly rejected attempts to frame her work primarily through the lens of confession or personal disclosure.

In interviews conducted after her treatment, she described her body and its changes as something fully under her own ownership and artistic control. Her comments reflected a broader resistance to the idea that depictions of illness by women artists must be understood as acts of apology, shame or emotional exposure.

Emin’s recent paintings have continued this engagement with mortality, chronic illness and recovery. Her 2023 work I watched Myself die and come alive depicts her body stretched across a table beneath the looming presence of death, while her mother’s ashes appear nearby in a casket.

Another painting, Barbed Wire Stitches from 2024, centres on surgical sutures and post-operative wounds, using distorted bodily imagery to foreground the physical consequences of illness.

The works formed part of a major exhibition at Tate Modern, where critics noted the continued intensity of Emin’s autobiographical style nearly three decades after My Bed brought her widespread international recognition.

Emin has frequently challenged the term “confessional art,” a label often attached to her work during the 1990s. In recent discussions with Maria Balshaw, the artist argued that her work was never intended as confession, but rather as a direct articulation of lived experience independent of audience expectations.

Art historians have increasingly situated Emin’s approach within a longer tradition of autobiographical female artists whose work engages directly with pain, disability and reproductive trauma. Comparisons with Kahlo have become especially prominent due to similarities in how both artists used self-representation to examine bodily suffering without idealisation.

Kahlo’s artistic practice was profoundly shaped by a 1925 bus accident in Mexico City that caused multiple life-altering injuries, including damage to her spine, pelvis and reproductive organs. During her lengthy recovery, her family installed a mirror above her bed, allowing her to paint self-portraits while immobilised. The experience became foundational to her artistic identity.

Works such as My Birth and The Broken Column depicted childbirth, miscarriage, chronic pain and bodily fracture in stark and often unsettling visual terms. In The Broken Column, Kahlo portrayed her torso split open to reveal a damaged classical column in place of a spine, visually linking physical injury with emotional endurance and religious symbolism.

Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera wrote in 1983 that Kahlo’s work possessed an intensity capable of holding viewers “in an uncomfortably tight grip,” a description that has also been applied to Emin’s art. Both artists resisted conventional expectations surrounding feminine beauty and bodily privacy, instead foregrounding injury, blood, scars and medical intervention as central subjects.

Emin has publicly acknowledged Kahlo’s influence on her thinking about art and suffering. In a 2005 essay, she reflected on the repeated personal tragedies that shaped Kahlo’s life, including miscarriage and chronic illness, and questioned how different circumstances might have altered the Mexican artist’s trajectory.

For contemporary audiences, the renewed attention surrounding Emin’s post-cancer works coincides with broader conversations in art institutions about disability representation, chronic illness and the visibility of medical realities within contemporary culture.

Curators and critics have increasingly highlighted how artists such as Emin and Kahlo transformed private physical suffering into public artistic language without seeking sentimentality or reassurance.The continuing relevance of both artists also reflects changing attitudes toward representations of women’s bodies in pain.

Rather than framing illness as something hidden or resolved, their work presents physical vulnerability as inseparable from identity, memory and artistic production.

Kahlo’s retrospective exhibition is scheduled to open at Tate Modern next month, extending institutional focus on autobiographical art practices that centre illness, disability and bodily transformation.

Tributes from artists, musicians and curators following the death of Valie Export have highlighted her lasting influence on feminist art, performance practice and the political use of the body in public space.

Export, whose confrontational performances and photographic works helped redefine feminist avant-garde art in Europe from the late 1960s onward, was remembered this week by figures across contemporary art, music and theatre.

Many cited her willingness to challenge conventions surrounding nudity, spectatorship and gendered power structures.Canadian musician Peaches described one of Export’s most recognisable images — showing the artist in crotchless trousers holding a gun as permanently fixed in her memory.

Peaches said the photograph represented a fearless artistic gesture that continued to resonate decades after it was created.She also compared Export’s 1968 performance Tapp-und-Tastkino to Cut Piece by Yoko Ono. In the performance, Export wore a box resembling a miniature cinema over her bare chest and invited members of the public to place their hands inside through curtained openings.

Peaches said the work forced audiences to confront their own role in systems of looking, touch and power.Austrian choreographer and theatre director Florentina Holzinger said Export’s 1969 performance Genital Panic remained politically relevant in a digital era shaped by social media imagery and debates over bodily autonomy.

In the work, Export entered an experimental cinema in Munich wearing crotchless jeans and moved among seated audience members, confronting viewers directly with her exposed body. Holzinger said the performance challenged assumptions about how women’s bodies are viewed and regulated in public space.

She argued that Export’s work remained urgent amid contemporary political disputes surrounding gender, sexuality and censorship.“The female body is not a polite object,” Holzinger wrote in tribute. She described Export’s practice as a form of resistance directed against structures of social control and patriarchal power.

American artist Joan Jonas described Export as “bold, radical, innovative” and said her body-centred performances fundamentally altered how artists engaged with architecture, spectatorship and public confrontation.Jonas highlighted several key works from Export’s career, including Tapp-und-Tastkino, Genital Panic and Encirclement.

She also referenced Export’s reflections on Homo Meter II, in which the artist carried bread attached to her body in public spaces. Export described the work as an extension of the body and said audiences often reacted with uncertainty or discomfort.Jonas noted that Export frequently described the isolation involved in confronting audiences directly in public environments during the early years of feminist performance art.

South African artist Candice Breitz said Export demonstrated that artists did not need to conform to systems they opposed. Breitz characterised Export as a “feminist provocateur” whose work reclaimed public and institutional space historically dominated by men.

Breitz referred to a 1968 intervention in which Export led Austrian artist and curator Peter Weibel through the streets of Vienna on a leash. The performance has frequently been interpreted as a symbolic inversion of patriarchal authority and gender hierarchy within the European art world of the period.

Curator Shoair Mavlian emphasised Export’s importance to feminist photography and media criticism. Mavlian said photography was central to Export’s practice, particularly in the Body Configurations series, where the artist positioned her body against urban architecture in distorted or restrictive poses.

According to Mavlian, Export was among the first women artists to critically examine representations of women through photography and film while simultaneously using those media as tools of resistance. She referenced comments Export made during a 2024 exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, where the artist said feminist practitioners of the 1960s used the film camera “to see things with our own eyes, with our own thoughts.”

Export emerged in Austria during a period of growing experimental and political art movements in Europe. Her work combined performance, photography, film and conceptual art, frequently centring the body as a site of political struggle and social critique. Many of her best-known works challenged the passive representation of women in cinema, advertising and visual culture.

Her influence extended across generations of feminist artists, performers and theorists, particularly those examining surveillance, spectatorship, bodily autonomy and media representation. Scholars have frequently situated Export alongside artists such as Yoko Ono and other pioneers of postwar feminist performance art whose work reshaped institutional understandings of authorship, gender and participation.

The renewed attention following Export’s death has also prompted broader reflection on the legacy of radical feminist art movements that emerged in Europe and North America during the late 1960s and 1970s, many of which directly challenged prevailing attitudes toward sexuality, censorship and the visibility of women’s bodies.

Export’s works continue to be exhibited internationally and remain central to discussions of feminist conceptual art, experimental cinema and performance history.