Terry Atkinson made his debut in the 1960s as a conceptual artist, founding the collective Art & Language, which he left in 1974 to devote himself to a language apparently distant from the current he had helped to found: painting. Atkinson adopts an iconic register close to that of socialist realism but with a parodic and surreal, if not grotesque, approach that helps to infuse his works with a critical approach far from any celebratory ideology. A recurring theme throughout his production is the representation of war: from the first to the second world war, from Vietnam to Lebanon to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The long titles of the works, an element inherited from conceptual practice, become an integral part of the work and contextualise it, as happens with the work exhibited here whose title reads: Botched-up art work depicting intra sexual, intra working, class sadistic act under the Emergency Power Act, the two acts undertaken in the service of imperialism, where Atkinson represents a trench in which two soldiers in the foreground are engaged in a brutal hand-to-hand fight in a clash not only between opposing sides but also between social classes.
