Terry Atkinson
Galleria Six, Milan
12 April - 14 June 2025
FRONTISPIECE
© Terry Atkinson
Courtesy of Galleria Six, Milan
Galleria Six presents a solo exhibition by TERRY ATKINSON.
For his third exhibition at Galleria Six, a new cycle of works entitled FRONTISPIECE is presented and exhibited together with Terry Atkinson's works from the late 1970s and 1980s. A dialogue between a present and a past that comes alive again.
The initial elements of the new series of works, which is still ongoing, are two books. The first is From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics by Quentin Skinner, published in 2018. The second is Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, published in 1964.
These two stimuli are quickly followed by a third, triggered by the fact that Terry Atkinson introduced a portrait of himself from 1964 as a recurring motif in some of the works in the series.
"The works are a mix of certain what I consider to be relevant words and images relevant to the task in hand. The words are frontispiece, portal, threshold, hubris, and maybe some others to come as the series move on. The images , thus far, are photocopies of my two daughters when they were young on a visit to German concentration camp at Natzwiller-Struthof in the Vosges, images from Goya, a portrait of myself, Hobbes’ frontispiece for Leviathan, and a number of other images.I attempt to construct the works not least through resonating the words inscribed on the tableaux - Portal, something you see through or view from; Threshold, something you cross; Hubris – in this case an attempt to maneouvre the concept of the artist as an extreme self-assured projection, the model of the artist as a self-confirming centre of truth. And so on …"Terry Atkinson April 2nd, 2025
TERRY ATKINSON (1939, Thurnscoe, UK). Lives and works in Leamington Spa. An English visual artist and theorist, in his long career he has challenged the traditional conception of aesthetics in art, criticising the conventions of artistic production and fruition.
‘If the work I have made over the last 40 years,’ says Terry Atkinson, ’has one characteristic that runs through it, it is a concern to make a critique of art rather than a celebration of it.
After studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, he emigrated to New York in 1967 where he met minimalist, conceptual and land artists such as Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Carl Andre and Robert Smithson. In 1968 he founded the conceptual collective Art & Language together with Michael Baldwin, Harold Hurrell and David Bainbridge, together they exhibited at documenta 5 (1972) curated by Harald Szeemann. He left the group in 1974 to pursue a solo career. He exhibited in 1984 at the 41st Venice Art Biennale. In 1985 he was a finalist for the Turner Prize.
GALLERIA SIX
Piazzale Gabrio Piola, 5 - 20131 Milano
