Terry Atkinson - INDEPENDENT 2026 New York

Josey is thrilled to announce its participation at Independent Art Fair and the New Yorkdebut of artist Terry Atkinson. This solo presentation includes drawings from Atkinson’srecent series ‘Frontispiece’ (2025–ongoing) and ‘American Heads’ (2025–ongoing)alongside a ‘Grease Work’ sculpture (1990/2025).

‘Frontispiece’ is a compression of Atkinson’s seventy-year practice into layered tableaux. Earlier works rise up as disruptive intrusions alongside stencilled slogans reading ‘NARCISSISM’ and ‘CONCEIT’. Artfully drawn pseudonyms question authorship and selfhood, while words such as ‘PORTAL’ and ‘THRESHOLD’ suggest disjunctures in time and identity. As a motif in the works the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) is an allegorical figure embodying the authority of singular power and a warning against its excess. It is an ambivalence Atkinson embeds in his own practice.

‘American Heads’ is a continuation of Atkinson’s ongoing studies of domestic conflicts in North America. ‘American Heads’ presents portraits of heads of state and community leaders on an existential plain with artists, bit-part entertainers and onlookers such as the sister of the boy who befriended E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jean-Michel Basquiat or theProud Boys. It is a phantasmagoric spectacle of the most powerful representative democracy in the Western hemisphere.

The ‘Grease Works’ use grease as both material and metaphor to model the artistic subject as constructed by ‘software’ running within the body’s biological ‘hardware’. Materially, grease blurs boundaries – like ‘wet paint’ with sculptural presence – disrupting divisions between actuality and abstraction, and between artistic media. Works such as Grease Flag (1991) unfurl this into political territory, invoking the Union Jack to suggest shifting ideological borders. Later, Atkinson described grease as a kind of automaton – self-operating within set conditions, anticipating ideas close to Artificial Intelligence.
Atkinson taught art for more than six decades and regards art pedagogy as the keyprogramme in shaping what he terms the Avant Garde Mode of Artistic Subjectivity, or AGMOAS. Like ‘Frontispiece’, presented here, the ‘Grease Works’ have been a way forthe Atkinson to give an account of what it is to be an artist who is witness to history.

-- Jonathan P. Watts

Terry Atkinson is widely regarded as an important British artist of his generation and a pioneer of conceptual art, Atkinson was a founding member of the group Fine-Artz (1963), and the influential collective Art & Language (1968-74).
Terry Atkinson’s work is included in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art,Dublin; the Tate, London; Mumok, Vienna; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.