"The exhibition explores the tension between
thought and vision, between concept and image"
Ca' Pesaro - Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna
Terry Atkinson - The Artist as a Semantic Engine
The exhibition at Ca' Pesaro - Terry Atkinson - The Artist as a Semantic Engine - curated by - Elisabetta Barisoni and Elena Forin - until March 1 - presents some crucial phases of the work of Terry Atkinson, one of the most important English artists of recent decades. Recently added to the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, his work belongs to the strand of International Conceptual Research. It's uniqueness, however, consists in having interpreted profound theoretical contents in a vocabulary with a very strong visual value.
Terry Actor - Enola Gay - 1992
In 1968, Terry Atkinson co-founded Art & Language with David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell to question entrenched artistic practices and representations. Their critical stance attracted nearly fifty artists between 1968 and 1982. Over time, Atkinson distanced himself from the group’s evolving ideology, feeling that conceptualism had become “calcified", and in 1974 he abandoned the group's approach to return to that of a solo artist - from "We" to "I".
The Russell Series -1995
Curators - Elena Forin and Elisabetta Barisoni
When he left Art & Language he was thirty-five years old and already had a solid and fully aware artistic career behind him. The field he explores is that of the present in which he lives and whose dynamics he questions. Wars, which he considers forms of political action conducted by other means, are one of his fields of research, but the urge to examine the language of art itself has always been at the centre of his interest.
Goya Work - Letter from the Artist - Series 2 No. 6
Family-map modernist surface tourer. Foreground/background Xeroxes.
Ruby and Amber in front of the incinerators at the preserved
Natzwiller-Struthof Memorial Camp - August 1985.
Background/foreground surface mutant. Dear Modernism - 1986
as engaged with time itself."
"A study of the value of time and of humanity’s aptitudes as engaged with time itself."
For over sixty years, Atkinson has linked the dynamics of human history to those of aesthetics, intertwining acts of composition with human actions. His work forms a map of images, symbols and texts, none of them neutral, each exposing the power structures embedded in messages. It is a sustained inquiry into time, its value, and humanity’s ways of engaging with it.
Draped Head - 1986
Easter Lily Booby trap connected to iradiating inscriptions of the names of some votaries x-rayed into the wall of the bunker... - 1986
A large painting on paper dedicated to the Vietnam War opens the narrative concerning Atkinson's use of painting as a form of political and moral analysis.
In rock n'roll consumership "working class" is a null class ...
Private Caprichos no.73-Face, Vietcong, South Vietnamese Ranger,
Private Buddy Holly-Face, Vietcong, South Vietnamese Rangers,
The Plain Reeds -1976
The exhibition presents some of his best-known series: Enola Gay - Grease Works Goya Series - American Civil War - the very powerful papers of the - Russell Series - and a large body of drawings from the 1960s.
This - 1996