Ed Atkins, Tate Britain: Deeply unsettling

Telegraph

01-04-2025

'I'm not a particularly sad person,' the British artist Ed Atkins once said, with a rueful giggle, 'but a lot of the work ends up coming out quite miserable.' You don't say! Saturated with references to loss and grief, his mid-career survey at Tate Britain – which premieres a new, feature-length film in which the actor Toby Jones narrates a diary kept by his father following a terminal-cancer diagnosis – may be the saddest show I've ever encountered.
It's also one of the more cussedly obfuscating and pretentious. (Referring to his own artworks, Atkins admits: 'They are profoundly obscure, even to me.') Yet, somehow, by staging a sort of 'Danse Macabre' between cutting-edge technology and timeless emotions, he manages to summon something sorcerous and compelling.
Born in 1982, Atkins grew up in a village outside Oxford, and graduated, in 2009, from the Slade, around the time his father discovered he was dying. Since then, he has accrued cachet for unsettling, conspicuously artificial computer-generated videos and animations that often utilise AI and feature glitchy, limp-looking digital surrogates of himself, drawing upon various tropes from advertising, video games, and cinema.
Starring a stock figure from a company specialising in 3D graphics, Hisser (2015) imagines a sinkhole opening beneath the bedroom of a man in Florida. (Atkins came across this macabre incident in a news story; the man's body was never found.) In The worm [sic] (2021), a jerky digital double of Atkins, resembling a bespectacled Newsnight presenter sitting alone in a spot-lit studio, interviews his mother. Pianowork 2 (2023) presents a realistic, computer-generated likeness of Atkins, with gold earrings and a monk-like buzz cut, hunched over a piano while performing a melancholic piece by the Swiss composer Jürg Frey.
Atkins says that he's interested in the artificiality of digital representation; it's the failure (even 'impotence', as he puts it) of contemporary digital technology to express feelings, rather than its wider impact upon society, which preoccupies him. His work is simultaneously creepy and hesitant.
Despite the CGI trickery, he's not averse to an old-school, freehand approach. In a series of technically impressive, monochrome self-portraits, executed in red pencil upon pale-pink paper, Atkins – who says that he loathes the way he looks – depicts his face from unusual, unflattering angles, so that it appears corpse-like. In a neurotic subset of these drawings (which, frankly, seem like a cry for help), he fuses his blankly staring, open-mouthed head with the body of a gigantic spider.
To offset the psychic turmoil, he includes a room of tiny, surreal and cartoonish drawings on Post-it notes, brimming with love as well as strangeness, which he started making for his children during the pandemic (slipping them, daily, into his daughter's lunchbox). In one of the show's disarming, first-person wall-texts, he says that he considers these 'the best things I've ever made'. I get it: here, Atkins relaxes and expresses himself directly, liberated from the burden of self-consciousness.
Many people, I suspect, may feel nonplussed, even irritated, by this difficult exhibition, which can seem dense to the point of impenetrability, as well as lachrymose. Yet, like it or not, mournfulness is a part of human experience. Atkins's work may, on occasion, be clever-clever, even aggressively antithetical to mainstream culture. But it's also original – and, despite (or paradoxically because of) the distancing effect of all that tech, sometimes moving.