Ed Atkins

Ed Atkins is one of the most influential artists of his generation. Troubled by melancholy, undermined by bathos, and tempered with humor, his works pit a weightless digital life against a corporal world of craft and touch, allegorizing profound experiences of loss, intimacy, and love

Ed Atkins is one of the most influential artists of his generation. Troubled by melancholy, undermined by bathos, and tempered with humor, his works pit a weightless digital life against a corporal world of craft and touch, allegorizing profound experiences of loss, intimacy, and love. This ambitious publication provides a radical survey of his career, assembling a wide range of paintings, writing, embroideries, and drawings alongside the moving-image works for which he is best known. Essays from leading scholars, authors, and curators, alongside previously unpublished behind-the-scenes production photographs and a curated selection of new drawings, collectively probe Atkins’s practice to ask: What kind of realism is at stake here?

Accompanying a new major exhibition of contemporary artist Ed Atkins, this career-spanning publication assembles paintings, writings, embroideries and drawings alongside Atkins’s moving-image works in a succession of large-scale installations. For over a decade, Ed Atkins has been making videos and animations that trace the dwindling gap between representation and embodied experience. Using his desires, experiences and body as a model, Atkins’s works misuse contemporary technologies of representation to critically reflect what they have done to images and our sense of self. Troubled by melancholy, undermined by bathos and tempered with humour, his works pit a weightless digital life against a corporal world of craft and touch, allegorising profound experiences of loss, intimacy, and love. This ambitious publication provides a radical survey of his career, assembling a wide range of paintings, writing, embroideries and drawings alongside the moving-image works for which he is best-known. Essays from leading scholars, authors and curators, alongside previously unpublished behind-the-scenes production photographs and a curated selection of new drawings collectively probe Atkins’ practice to ask: what kind of realism is at stake here?