Terry Atkinson, Pink Enola Gay Axe-Head Mute with two Enola Gay, 1991, 89.5 × 122 cm, Acrylic on board, Private collection

In Venice, an exhibition devoted to Terry Atkinson brings back to the foreground a question that runs through his entire practice: art as a field for the production of meaning, rather than a purely visual object. A key figure of British conceptual art, Atkinson was among the founders of Art & Language in the late 1960s, playing a decisive role in redefining the relationship between artwork, language and theory. The exhibition conveys this trajectory by allowing the underlying lines of thought that span decades of work to emerge, rather than following a rigid chronological order. After the collective experience, Atkinson chose to continue on an individual path while preserving the critical tension that had animated the group. In his works, the image does not relinquish its visual force but acquires a conceptual density that challenges the idea of a neutral gaze. Painting, drawing and text coexist in an unstable balance, where references to history, politics and the conflicts of the twentieth century become lenses through which the present is examined. What emerges is an idea of art as an ongoing critical process, capable of generating meaning without ever fixing it definitively. Atkinson does not offer answers but constructs devices that compel thought, slow down perception and expose the fractures running through contemporary visual language. In this zone of friction between image and thought, his work continues to question the role of the artist as a generator of meaning, rather than a producer of self-contained forms.

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