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.