Tracey Emin is the British tabloid queen, beloved bad girl of Fleet Street, high-art priestess of the new mass spectacle of the abject. Ordinary people adore her. Like Eloise, she cuts an impertinent swath through the sticky upper crust. Like Pippi Longstocking, she has magical powers that won't be stopped. And like the Willendorf Venus -- much thinner, of course -- she speaks a female sex at the center of the universe.

All these qualities can be found in Emin's new exhibition of sculptures and embroidered and quilted works on canvas at Lehmann Maupin, her second show at the gallery, now housed in a glorious new space designed by Rem Koolhaas on West 26th Street in Chelsea.

The new work still has the matter-of-fact vulgarity that is Emin's trademark, and the prevailing message is one of primal sex. On the one hand, her sex is a fountainhead, as in Self-Growth, a graffiti of a flower sprouting from between spread legs that has been embroidered on canvas. On the other, her sex is insatiable, as suggested by one of her neon signs, fabricated in the artist's handwriting, which reads, "People like you need to fuck people like me."

Still, Emin wants to be more than a gutter poet, and she succeeds rather well, I think, in elevating her hard-core expressionism to a kind of heartfelt feminist poetry. Centerpiece of the installation is an elaborate canopied bed, titled To Meet My Past, which has an emotional confession inscribed on the sheets, only partly hidden by the quilt. Other works venture into the realm of lyrical objects -- a group of flowering plants with small plaster models of sparrows set in the pots, for instance, or the especially beautiful bronze cast of her own head (despite being morbidly called Death Mask), with her charming bouche, a "seductively languid pelican's beak of saucy relaxation, poor dentistry and careless living," as Charlie Finch put it.

One group of nine color photographs, called Self-portrait with Docket, even toys with a literary device, as the artist struggles to hold her impatient cat in her lap, making a visual homophone on "pussy" -- her own version of Courbet's Creation of the World.

British newspapers have already reported that supercollector Charles Saatchi may be the anonymous purchaser of her bed sculpture. He could pair it with one of Emin's earlier works, the scandalous bed strewn with condoms, cigarette butts and vodka bottles that figured in the Tate's Turner Prize exhibition of 1999 and which Saatchi also bought, presumably to be the centerpiece of his new museum in London.

As for Emin's prices, hers is the story of a home-girl made good. The show includes several very large quilted works that list at $104,000 -- at least one was sold at the opening -- and easel-sized works are priced between $40,000 and $60,000. Most big collectors and major museums have to have their Tracey Emin.