Post-its and gigantic babies, Ed Atkins’s daring Tate exhibition proves he’s the most interesting artist in Britain today

Career-spanning exhibition is undeniably very clever – but more than that, it is heartfelt and deeply autobiographical

In ‘Hisser’ (2015), a ‘customised stock figure from the online marketplace Turbosquid’ stands in for artist Ed Atkins (Ed Atkins)

It’s been a good decade since Ed Atkins was first mooted as a potentially major figure in British art, for computer-generated videos and animations that appeared dizzyingly ahead of the technical and conceptual curve. If he seemed to disappear from view over lockdown (as did many artists), he returns to the limelight now as the recipient of a major survey exhibition at Tate Britain – one of very few living, let alone younger, artists to be accorded that honour.

The show is taking place in a digital terrain that’s vastly more complex and embattled than it was even five years ago, where there is not just a “dwindling gap between the digital world and human experience”, as the blurb puts it, but a universal understanding that it’s ever more difficult to get a reaction from the over-saturated consumer, and people, faced with an increasing number of communication platforms, crave above all the authenticity of the face-to-face.

Far from trying to sidestep these issues, the exhibition plays with them, sometimes brilliantly, and occasionally hilariously, in a range of mediums from ultra-hi-tech digital reconstruction to handmade drawings, embroidery and that great under-explored artistic resource known as the Post-it note. The now 42-year-old, Oxford-born, Copenhagen-based Atkins appears in various digitised incarnations, as the show muses on the theme of loss, building towards the culminating work, a feature length film on the death of his father.

There’s clearly no shortage of ambition here then, though some of the most engaging video works are the earliest and most technically primitive, cobbled together with laptops and cellphones. Described in the wall text as “a very intimate video that quickly sheds its specificity in order to foreground its construction”, Cur (2010) put me in mind of someone trying to re-stage 2001: A Space Odyssey on their kitchen table, with pieces of fruit and the tops of people’s heads looming planet-like out of the darkness.

These works, completed immediately after Atkins finished studies at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, are offset by hand-embroidered “samplers”, as Atkins calls them, pieces of cloth covering the soundproofing screens embroidered with barely perceptible lines from his father’s cancer diaries, which form the central text of the show’s final film.

In place of the usual dry-as-dust wall texts, Atkins has provided his own chattily informal written commentaries (his parents are “my mum and dad”). He’s nothing if not lucid as a guide to his own show, butthere were times when I wanted to shake him off and come to my own conclusions.

In Hisser (2015), a “customised stock figure from the online marketplace Turbosquid” stands in for Atkins, in a restaging of the true story of a man from Florida who was swallowed into a sinkhole while asleep in bed. Atkins’s naked digitised surrogate is seen masturbating (though facing away from the “camera”) and lying in bed fretfully mouthing the words to a pop song (I believe it’s Elton John and Kiki Dee’s “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”). The fact that his disappearance into the sinkhole feels like a cursory afterthought leaves the point of the whole absurdly complex procedure a touch mystifying, which I dare say is the point.

This exhibition features moving image works from the last 15 years alongside writing, paintings, embroideries and drawings (Ed Atkins)

Refuse.exe (2019), in which theatrical curtains draw back to reveal masses of mind-boggling junk – chains, skeletons, fish – crashing onto a stage in hyper-detailed images seems to test the very limits of the term “animation”, while arousing the sense that when everything is digitally possible, nothing feels truly remarkable. The same might be said of a gigantic baby playing a piano in a fairy-tale cottage or the generically medieval surrogate for Atkins who, looking a bit like Richard E Grant, sheds floods of gluey-looking grey tears. Is he supposed to be another manifestation of the show’s central theme of loss? While the setting for this group of exhibits, huge double-tier racks of stage costumes, on loan from Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, might be assumed to signify the etherealness of the absent human presence, it’s their blunt actuality that impresses.

Our developing sense of the exhibition as a competition between the surrogate and the actual is compounded in Pianowork 2 (2023), in which another Atkins surrogate – in this case looking so like him you’d swear it was straight film – “mimes” to a recording of the real Atkins playing Jurg Frey’s one-note composition “Klavierstück 2”. In this case, it feels like the analogue element has “won”. While Frey’s work represents a formalist avant garde, which many would consider as obsolete as the hockiest digital technology, the piece’s uncompromising discipline, in which the player physically counts out the spaces between the notes, feels as timelessly actual as, say, Michelangelo’s David.

The Worm (2021), in which a smartly dressed “interviewer” figure plays Atkins’s role in a real-life phone conversation with his mother, is described by the artist as an “artificial documentary of something very much alive and utterly real”. It’s that realness that compels our attention, though we are, of course, wondering how real the disembodied mother’s voice actually is, even as she talks of her own struggles to make herself feel real to herself in the face of a difficult relationship with her mother.

‘Refuse.exe’ (2019) tests the very limits of the term ‘animation’ (Ed Atkins)

In the show’s climactic work, the two-hour film Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me (2024), the digital is apparently abandoned altogether, though the film’s gruelling content is still very much mediated by artifice. Toby Jones, everyone’s favourite “everyman” actor, reads out the diary kept by Atkins’ father Philip, during the six months prior to his death from cancer in 2009, to a small audience of young people.

The diaries’ admirably unsentimental and matter-of-fact tone is maintained in the film, resisting the temptation to make the material more “moving” than it already is. Most visitors will probably drop in and out of it, rather than try to do it in one sitting, but – without wishing to give too much away – they shouldn’t miss the end when Jones and his onscreen partner Claire (Saskia Reeves) suddenly start enacting a childlike game of nurses and patients, that was played in real life by Atkins and his daughter.

If this sounds a shade silly and self-indulgent, there’s a palpable sense of the changing of generations: the performed creativity of the parent who is departing is replaced by that of the child who has just arrived.

Baby grand: Among the striking images is a baby playing a piano (Ed Atkins)

The artist’s daughter reappears as the recipient of a series of Post-it note drawings, which Atkins has placed in her lunchbox each day during lockdown, when his ongoing projects were suspended, as “little hellos, little irruptions of love into her day”. While the drawings themselves are fun, and occasionally border on brilliant, it’s Atkins’ realisation that the gesture was far more important for him than it was for her (something every parent will instantly recognise) that makes them poignant, and his belief that they are “the best things” he’s done that makes them significant. Although Atkins’s garrulous commentaries do occasionally exasperate earlier on in the exhibition, they make more sense as the themes develop. While the show feels as though it will be all about clever concepts and impenetrably stylish surfaces, it is one of the most heartfelt and overtly autobiographical exhibitions I’ve ever experienced – as well as being undeniably very clever. The cycle of life from parents to children to grandchildren is paralleled by the cycle of technology, from low-tech, to hi-tech, to no-tech.

I came to this exhibition skeptical of some of the claims made for Atkins’ significance as an artist, but I came away a lot more convinced than I expected. If there’s a more interesting artist working in Britain today, I haven’t yet encountered them.

The Ed Atkins exhibition at Tate Britain runs from 2 April to 25 August