Tracey Emin: Male artists like Damien Hirst peak in their forties

Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst at a party at  Claridge's in 2010
Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst were both part of the were part of the Young British Artists movement - Dave M. Benett/Getty Images

Male artists like Damien Hirst peak in their forties, Dame Tracey Emin has said.

The artist, 61, said that most men become less of a creative “force” after they reach the age of 40.

She singled out Hirst, who is also a former Turner Prize nominee, as no longer having the “belief” and “conviction” he had at the start of his career.

Dame Tracey is one of Britain’s most celebrated female artists, while Hirst, 59, is said to be the richest living artist in the country.

“I think it’s really hard to be an artist,” she told The Louis Theroux podcast on Spotify. “I think it’s really difficult.

“I think people who don’t make art or don’t attempt to be an artist, don’t understand how difficult it is to have that conviction, that self-belief and everything.

“Damien was a young artist that started off with a lot of that belief and a lot of that conviction. He was like a force. And now he’s not.”

Both Dame Tracey and Hirst were part of the Young British Artists movement in the 1990s who exhibited together.

The artist added that men “sort of peak in their forties”, whereas “women just tend to come and come and come and come and come, so as a woman, you carry on coming all your life until you’re old”.

She cited France-born artist Louise Bourgeois, who kept working until she died aged 98 in 2010, as an example of a woman who has kept going.

Dame Tracey added: “Like now, if you look [at the painter] Joan Mitchell, for example, she’s undoubtedly one of the greatest American abstract painters ever, better than Jackson Pollock.”

Dame Tracey also told Theroux that she had been concerned that her art would be treated as a joke if she featured in his “When Louis Met…” documentary series in the 1990s.

At the time, she was a headline-grabbing artist whose most notable work was Everyone I Have Ever Slept With And My Bed, which contained the names of all her romantic partners.

During a discussion about the 1997 Turner Prize on Channel 4, she interrupted critics, swearing, and walked out, saying: “I’m leaving now. I want to be with my mum.

“I was really, really in the public eye in those days, really a lot,” she said. “And it was, you know, tabloids, all kinds of things, all the wrong things.

“And you were just going to make it worse for me. That’s what I thought. So I didn’t, but I liked you and I respected, I liked the way you made your programmes and things.

“I thought you were an interesting person, but I didn’t want to do it because a lot of people had an angle against contemporary art then, which I thought was wrong.”

Dame Tracey became a dame in the King’s Birthday Honours list for services to art earlier this year.

She was treated for bladder cancer in 2020 and had a urostomy, meaning she now wears a stoma bag. She also had a complete hysterectomy.