She came to fame by showing a bed strewn with soiled underwear, stained sheets and a used condom and went on to tell us about her rape, her depression and her voracious appetite for sex in confessional art.

Yesterday, at the Venice Biennale, the world’s most important contemporary art fair, Tracey Emin revealed yet more intimate details about her life – her two abortions, including a botched one in 1990 that left her devastated both physically and mentally, she said.

Her show includes semi-abstract watercolours that hint at her favourite subject – couples having sex – and a text piece, with her trademark misspellings, in which she describes the loss of a child and feelings of “failure as an artist and most of all as a human being”.

She had been unable to show these works until now. Memories of the abortions were too raw and she did not want to display them in a commercial show, she said – although she conceded that half of the Abortion Watercolours unveiled yesterday have already been “reserved” by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

She spoke in detail about the second abortion, in 1990, which involved twins. She had it, she said, because the father “wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in having me as the mother of his children and I was mentally unstable at the time”. But she has no regrets: “It’s my reason for being loyal and passionate to what I do.”

The British taxpayer has paid £250,000 for the show, staged by the British Council. But profits from any works sold, for between £12,000 and £325,000, will go to the artist and her dealer, Jay Jopling, of the White Cube. Having been chosen for the Biennale her prices will rise dramatically.

Andrea Rose, director of visual arts for the British Council and the Biennale Commissioner, said that the White Cube was doing its bit by covering the cost of entertaining.

Emin, 43, has cultivated an image as a foul-mouthed hell-raiser of Brit Art. She caused a furore with My Bed, which she entered for the Turner Prize in 1999, and with Everyone I Have Ever Slept with, a tent embroidered with 102 names. Yesterday she showed that her ability to shock has not waned in a show filled with drawings of genitalia, masturbation and explicit poses involving her body.

To some, the drawings are little more than the sketchiest of doodles by an artist who admits, in the exhibition catalogue, that she did not go to the Tate until she was 22 because she “could never find it”.

But Ms Rose said: “She can draw and paint very beautifully. She uses her femininity without embarrassment and paints what it feels like to inhabit a female body.”

She was not alone. Those at the sneak preview – before the public opening on Saturday – were Emin’s longstanding admirers and they were seduced by her yet again.

Arthur Hershaft, an American businessman whose wife is involved with the Guggenheim in New York, said excitedly: “I love the whole idea of how she looks at her body. It’s very sexual. It’s great.”

Brett Graham, a financier from New York, goes to bed with one of her text pieces every night. The words “When I think about sex . . .” hang above his head. He looked as if he wanted to buy one of the new pieces, which he described as “totally unique and raw”.

Emin admits that she looks for inspiration to a male artist – Egon Schiele, the Austrian Expressionist noted for the eroticism of his figurative works.

She said: “Schiele is feminine. Also Munch. They dealt with jealousy, sex, fear, vulnerability. But no man could have made my work.”

Since the Biennale was founded over a century ago, the British pavilion has seen only two other female artists, Rachel Whiteread in 1997 and Bridget Riley in 1968.

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