Ed Atkins is best known for his computer-generated videos and animations. Repurposing contemporary technologies in unexpected ways, his work traces the dwindling gap between the digital world and human feeling. He borrows techniques from literature, cinema, video games, music and theatre to examine the relationship between reality, realism and fiction.
This career-spanning exhibition features moving image works from the last 15 years alongside writing, paintings, embroideries and drawings. Together, they pit a weightless digital life against the physical world of heft, craft and touch. Atkins uses his own experiences, feelings and body as models to explore themes of intimacy, love and loss. For Atkins, the exhibition represents a reimagining of the messy, unravelling realities of life.
'My life and my work are inextricable. How do I convey the life-ness that made these works – my life-ness – through the exhibition? Not in some factual, chronological, biographical way, but through sensations. I want it so the more you see, the richer, more complex, less authored, less gettable things become.'
—Ed Atkins
Ed Atkins Pianowork 2 2023 © Ed Atkins. Courtesy: the Artist, Cabinet London, dépendance, Brussels, Gladstone Gallery, New York and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.
Ed Atkins Pianowork 2 2023 © Ed Atkins. Courtesy: the Artist, Cabinet London, dépendance, Brussels, Gladstone Gallery, New York and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.
Ed Atkins Pianowork 2 2023 © Ed Atkins. Courtesy: the Artist, Cabinet London, dépendance, Brussels, Gladstone Gallery, New York and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.
