Emin first gained notoriety nearly three decades ago as a member of the YBAs (Young British Artists), with deeply personal and confessional works that chronicled her life, thoughts, joys, and sorrows, often obscured by an apparently reckless and hedonistic lifestyle. Over the years, as her steady, prolific output attracted high-profile collectors, prestigious museum and gallery shows, and an international audience, her public image gradually morphed from that of an art world wild child to a pillar of its establishment. This perception was cemented by her election to the Royal Academy in 2007, followed by her appointment there as a professor — one of only two women in the institution’s history ever to achieve this distinction. (The other is Fiona Rae.)

Today Emin ranks among the best-known British artists. Her position within the international art market, though, seems less settled. Francis Outred, the Christie’s head of postwar and contemporary art in Europe, concedes that Emin’s auction prices do not match her fame: The record for a non-charity sale is £157,250 ($250,000), achieved at Christie’s London in February 2010 for one of her appliqué blankets, It’s the Way We Think, 2004. Outred describes her market as a peculiarly British phenomenon, with a limited auction market that does not match the extent of public interest. More to the point, he says, “buyers of her best works are committed collectors and do not want to sell,” thereby limiting the supply.

Representatives at Emin’s primary galleries — White Cube in London and Lehmann Maupin in New York — concur, saying that her more substantial exhibited works all sell, yet few reappear on the secondary market. The galleries placed work from her exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale at prices from £12,000 to £350,000 ($24,000 to $700,000), including some substantial sculptures. None of the large-scale works have reappeared at auction to date.

“Collectors want to keep her sculptures; they don’t want to sell,” says gallerist David Maupin, who will give over both of his New York gallery spaces to Emin’s work in May. “In my view, she is a visual poet, and one of the most important living artists. Although her work sells well, hers is not a speculator’s market.”

The roster of museum and private collections holding her work is extensive, the private list peppered with celebrities — Orlando Bloom and Kate Moss — and prominent collectors — Anita Zabludowicz, Victor Pinchuk, Kent Logan, the Rubell Family — and notables who straddle both worlds — Elton John, George Michael, and Kenny Goss, who may well possess the greatest number of her works.

According to Daniela Gareh, director of sales at White Cube, American collectors were the first to snap up Emin’s major works in the early 1990s. But the collector who probably did more than anyone else to put her on the map is Charles Saatchi.

For his legendary “Sensation” exhibition in 1997, he acquired Emin’s tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, 1995, a small camping shelter embroidered with the names of everyone she had ever slept with, including her mother at birth. Private dealer Eric Frank originally bought the tent from her for £12,000 ($19,000) and sold it to Saatchi for £40,000 ($64,000). Saatchi was rumored to have turned down an offer of £300,000 ($540,000) before it was destroyed in a catastrophic 2004 Momart storage fire.

Saatchi’s other major acquisition was My Bed, 1998, which he bought for £150,000 ($248,000) from Lehmann Maupin’s “Every Part of Me’s Bleeding,” the exhibition that won the artist a nomination for the 1999 Turner Prize. The installation consists of her actual bed — unmade and with soiled sheets — on a dirty rug littered with empty vodka bottles, cigarette butts, condoms, and other detritus. Saatchi still owns the work, and market insiders believe it is so iconic that it would now fetch in excess of $1.5 million.

Saatchi also paid the top auction price for a group of Emin’s paintings when he acquired Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, 1996, at Christie’s London in February 2001 for £108,250 ($157,000), outbidding the Tate Gallery and more than doubling a high estimate of £40,000 ($58,000). The paintings were the product of a performance by Emin in Sweden, during which she sought to overcome anxieties going back to her student days, when she destroyed all her paintings.

Born in 1963 in Croyden, London, Emin was raised in poverty in the seaside town of Margate after her father left her mother. Emin’s teenage years saw a catalogue of misfortune, including rape, pregnancies, and abortions, which are all intimately documented in her work. It was halfway through a two-year program at the Royal College of Art in 1989 that she demolished her paintings. Her longtime friend and fellow artist, Sarah Lucas, encouraged Emin to pursue her art through whatever methods inspired or motivated her. The two opened a shop selling art and objects in London in 1993. The same year she was spotted by gallerist Jay Jopling, who gave her a solo show cheekily titled “My Major Retrospective” at his then new White Cube gallery. It consisted mostly of memorabilia and a large embroidered blanket.

Following the debut at White Cube, which has shown her regularly since, came a breakthrough exhibition at the South London Gallery in 1997, the same year as Saatchi’s “Sensation” showcase at the Royal Academy. In the United States, Emin’s first showing was by White Cube at the Gramercy International Art fair (the forerunner of the Armory Show), in 1994. She was included the following year in Richard Flood’s “Brilliant!” exhibition of YBAs at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, and Lehmann Maupin began to represent her in 1997.

Emin’s work embraces a wide variety of media — from letters and memorabilia to photographs, drawings (her most prolific format), mono- and editioned prints, gouaches (mostly of her own body), paintings, videos, films, neon sculptures, textiles, and sculptures — with writing and storytelling the common thread.