UNTITLED

Unlike many of her British peers, Tracey Emin has earned an enviable reputation for her exceedingly frank -- make that naughty -- depictions of herself.

She’s perhaps best known for “My Bed,” which caused a ruckus in 1999 when she was nominated for the Turner Prize. It featured the mattress, replete with fecal stains, used condoms, vodka bottles and cigarette butts, that Emin refused to leave after enduring an abortion. Since then, Emin’s work has revealed sexual conquests, emotional scars and the darkest of family secrets.

But for her first L.A. show, at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills (gagosian.com) on Friday, the 44-year-old artist claims she’s “really letting go.” “Since I don’t know a lot of people in L.A., I feel that I can really push myself a bit more,” she says. “There’s also something about L.A. that really makes you want to go wild.”

That means you can expect “mad” sculptures, abstract neon pieces and dozens of large-scale nude paintings of herself. All trade in her signature brand of poeticism, which walks a fine line between the literary and prosaic, the ambiguous and ironic.

Don’t mistake her imagery as pornography. Though the show’s title, “You Left Me Breathing,” could be interpreted as the moment after sex, Emin claims she’s less interested in titillation than in nailing those feelings of unrequited love, emptiness, frustration and desolation. “Ultimately sex is about so much more than eroticism,” she says.

-- theguide@latimes.com