Tracey Emin, Rothko Comfort Blanket, 2010

An article in Artnews recounts the story: When Tracey Emin was going to the Royal College of Art in London in the late 1980s, she broke down while viewing a radiant pink-and-yellow Mark Rothko painting at Tate Gallery. “I sat there and cried. I didn’t know why. I knew nothing of Rothko and at the time had no understanding of anything abstracted. I was in love with Edvard Munch" - Emin recounted to curator Bonnie Clearwater on the occasion of a major US exhibition. As the story went, for six months in 1993, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas (another YBA) opened a pop-up shop in east London called The Shop. They sold affordable pieces of ephemera, including a collaborative piece called "Rothko Comfort Blanket." The work was made by cutting up Emin's old baby blanket and stitching it with yellow thread to match the very color combination of the Mark Rothko painting at the Tate that moved her to tears - with a label reading: FOR PRIVATE VIEWS AND OTHER STATE OCCASIONS. And that takes us now to the present work. Flash forward seven years to 2010, when Emin, now far more famous than her collaboratrice, was invited to do a pop-up shop-in-shop at Selfridge's department store in London, she made new Rothko Comfort Blankets, without Lucas's name, and with a slightly different tag, in an edition of only 100 - each hand signed and numbered exclusively by Emin Well, they sold out immediately, and are now considered highly desirable and elusive collectors items.

Signature: Hand signed and numbered from the edition of 100 with ink title and inscription on the verso of tag "Rothko Comfort Blanket for Private Views and Other State Occasions."