Tracey Emin’s first-ever solo exhibition, in White Cube’s tiny original gallery, was titled “My Major Retrospective 1963–1993.” Two years later, still a relative unknown, she opened the Tracey Emin Museum (1995–98) in a south London storefront. Emin has always thought big and scaled up, a tactic abundantly observed in this giant solo exhibition, “A Fortnight of Tears.” Sketchy, nude self-portrait drawings enlarged into some thirty big canvases; intimate handwritten notes magnified into the wall-size neon I Longed for You, 2019; tabletop clay figurines swelled into three room-size bronzes; and

A few years ago, I saw images of Rose English’s Quadrille, 1975, and became obsessed with her women wearing horsehair tails and footwear made with real horse hooves and doing dressage in the British countryside. The performance was outside my understanding of that era’s feminist sensibility. It wasn’t violent, durational, or angry but looked like some kind of fairy tale, something out of Angela Carter.

“Rose English: Form, Feminisms, Femininities” laid out the artist’s early interest in sexuality and ballet and her later turn to language, theatricality, and existential humor. Untitled Miss O’Murphy

These are exciting times for figurative painting. Promising new talents keep turning up. Among the latest arrivals is Florian Krewer, until recently one of Peter Doig’s students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Like the work of his teacher, Krewer’s eccentric explorations appear by turns hysterical and catastrophic. His pictures of adolescents hanging out in indeterminate urban locations show them caught in a kind of relaxed, abject splendor. Their faces, with Edvard Munch-like contortions or Francis Bacon-like smears, suggest they live a lifestyle founded on nihilism, caught in a state of