Tate Britain Spotlights the Uncanny Genius of Ed Atkins

In Ed Atkins’ world, bodies are restless, weightless and deeply confused. They float, moan, glitch, laugh and sometimes fall apart entirely, moving through the world as if constantly reminded of their own existence. Hyper-present yet simultaneously estranged, Atkins’ bodies – like our own, at times – are vessels for feeling that don’t quite know what to do with themselves.

Tate Britain has just opened the doors to the UK’s largest survey of Atkins’ work. A knack for the intimate and absurd has led him to become one of the biggest names in British digital art, and rightly so. Known for his computer-generated animations, the uncanny is his strength, reworking contemporary technologies only for something startlingly human to emerge: love, longing and grief, finished in pixel perfection.

The eponymously titled exhibition spotlights an array of moving image works, videos, writing, paintings, embroideries and drawing from the last 15 years. The show opens with Death Mask II (2010) and Cur (2010),  video works that gave rise to his distinctive visual style and mood. Further on, later works — such as Refuse.exe (2019), The Worm (2021) and Pianowork 2 (2024) — see Atkins’ shift into almost exclusively using CGI, only to return to the physical.

“He wants to induce a sense of the familiar made strange, of digression, mistake, confusion, incoherence and interruption,” the museum wrote. “For him, this exhibition represents a reimagining of the messy reality of life: the more we experience, the more complex and less contained it becomes.”

At the heart of the exhibition lays a vast collection of over 700 Post-It  drawings made for his children’s lunchboxes. Joyful, playful, confessional and absurd, these more everyday works hint at the show’s larger theme: the messy, real and uncontainable feeling that makes us people.

Ed Atkins is now on view through August 25.

Tate Britain
Millbank,
London SW1P 4RG,
United Kingdom