Ed Atkins

Accompanying Tate Britain’s major exhibition of contemporary artist Ed Atkins, this career-spanning hardback exhibition book 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 catalogue 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 Essays from leading scholars, authors and curators, alongside previously unpublished behind-the-scenes production photographs and a curated selection of new drawings collectively probe Atkins’ practice to ask: what kind of realism is at stake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?

 

For more information on purchasing this publication, please see here. 

(Currently unavailable for purchase from Gladstone) 

 

Published by Tate Publishing, 2025

 

ISBN: 978-1849769358

10.43 x 1.26 x 8.27 inches