Tracey Emin says that, at 45, she feels lighter and airier than she used to. If this is true, it must be a very recent change. As this exhibition of the past two decades of her work at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art shows, few artists have had the sustained bottle to hang out their soiled and trampled souls in quite the way Emin has for the past 20 years.

Self-portraits by Van Gogh and Lovis Corinth, some of Billie Holiday’s songs and Sylvia Plath’s last poems might seem comparably self-lacerating, and in their time all attracted the sort of disgust and/or obsessive admiration that Emin must be familiar with.