“On a tranquil afternoon at the gallery in the Torstrasse in the 90’s, at a time where we were a two person enterprise spending most of our time there, the bell rings. It is Sunday. Traey Emin), Manuel Bonig and his dog are downstairs asking if they can come up.

I had written Tracey after a trip to Paris and my marvel at the discovery of Tracey’s drawings at the Galerie Philippe Rizzo. We hadn’t heard back and here she was. We stayed cool, opened a bottle of wine and started to talk, cautiously not evoking the “why we”, and “how come she”, and acting as if this would be the most natural thing to do,  noticing that Tracey was scanning the space already while sitting there with us and mentioning which type of works would be where and how many of them and which size… the show was decided.

It was an extra-ordinary show. Free, straightforward, not laboured, raw, emotional, generous, poetic, precise. All walls were painted pale blue and covered with her beautiful rageous, witty, desperate poetry mixed with figuration, plenty of drawings, a room that was painted entirely in a dark blue and filled with her voice confessing how it all began in the film, curriculum? A photograph of her previous performance while painting naked in the room at the Galleri Andreas Brändström in Sweden was in the third room. The gallery was permanently full of visitors. we opened with a gigantic Turkish dinner cooked at the gallery by our friend Driss to honour Tracey’s Turkish dad. Mat Collishaw, Damien Hirst, and other friends from London came.”