15 November 2025 – 1 March 2026

Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art
Dom Pérignon Rooms, Second floor

Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni, Elena Forin

The exhibition 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. Its uniqueness, however, consists in having interpreted profound theoretical contents in a vocabulary with a very strong visual value.

In 1968 Terry Atkinson, with David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell, founded Art & Language, a group that sought to express the need to question the established practices and representations of the art system. The strength of this critical approach gave rise to a debate that between 1968 and 1982 attracted almost fifty artists to the group. Atkinson eventually found that he could no longer identify with some developments in the movement’s ideology. He felt that it was conceptualism itself that gradually became inevitably “calcified”, and in 1974 he abandoned the group’s approach to return to that of the solo artist (from “We” to “I”).

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.

For more than sixty years, Atkinson has seen links between the dynamics of human history and those of aesthetics, with the tensions of composing being entwined with those of individuals and their actions. Viewed in these terms, all his work is a map that reveals the close ties between images, symbols and texts. None of these elements is neutral, and every detail is a magnifying glass showing the figure of power often concealed in every message. His is therefore a profound work of understanding, a study of the value of time and of humanity’s aptitudes as engaged with time itself.

In addition to Enola Gay, the exhibition presents some of his other best-known series: Grease Works, the Goya Series and American Civil War, the very powerful papers of the Russell series and a large body of drawings from the 1960s.

Admission to the exhibition from 15 November 2025 to 1 March 2026, with the Museum’s hours and ticket.

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Terry Atkinson, born in 1939 in the village of Thurnscoe (Yorkshire), in 1968 was one of the founders of Art & Language, a group of radical intellectuals and artists, which he left to follow his own path in 1974 due to the emergence of positions inconsistent with his ideas. Also known as Terry Actor, Terry Mirrors, Terry Dog and Terry Enola Gay, he has exhibited in major museums around the world: participation in Documenta 5 in 1972 with Art & Language, solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1983, 41st Venice Biennale in 1984, finalist for the Turner Prize in 1985.

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