This work belongs to a rapidly-executed series of watercolour drawings, made while Emin was staying in Sydney in 2007. Emin’s work often professes to reveal intimate details about herself, and Sex is no different. Here the artist has used perspective to suggest a view looking down the length of her own bare figure. She has become her own subject, playing the role of both artist and muse. Though her splayed legs suggest a moment of intimacy, however, the figure is alone and there appears to be an absence of sex (notwithstanding the work’s title). Though the work is superficially autobiographical then, it also employs a number of formal and art historical devices which separate Sex from Emin’s personal life and which situate it in wider contexts. Within her own practice, for example, the monochrome use of a brilliant blue paint coincides with her luminous neon signs. There is an intentional gaucheness in both cases, with Emin seeking out colours that give the most vivid effect. What is more, the composition bears a poignant resemblance to the nude figure paintings of Egon Schiele. Emin’s manipulation of the figure, outlining the lower half of the female body and emphasising the pudenda, is in accord with various works by Schiele including Girl with Black Hair (1911, Museum of Modern Art, New York), which crops the female figure with the express intention of emphasising its sexual organs. Emin first visited Australia in 2004 when the Gallery of New South Wales held a retrospective exhibition of her work. Since then she has returned to the country on several occasions, most recently to install her work The Distance of Your Heart (2018), a public sculpture in Sydney which addresses themes of travel and homesickness. The series of drawings to which this work belongs is a further notable addition to Emin’s work Down Under.