Grease and its's cohorts

Published on the occasion of Terry Atkinson's exhibition ‘Greaser sculptures and drawings from the American Civil War, Curtis LeMay and Frontispiece series’ in 2025. GREASE AND ITS COHORTS features texts and sentences on grease written by Atkinson between 1988 and 2019 alongside 13 reproductions of the original ‘Grease Work’ drawings. Designed by Simon Persson and edited by Josey and Jonathan P. Watts.

Atkinson’s ‘Grease Works’ engage the formal language of abstract expressionism. Assembled from DIY-store materials, wooden chevroned and trapezoid structures, reminiscent of the canvases of Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella, are offset by horizonal bands of trough-like frames filled with generic petroleum grease. The ‘Grease Works’ were started at a time when Atkinson began to recognise the extreme self-assured projection of the artistic subject as a “self-confirming centre of truth” as a characteristic of modernism, which, by the early 2000s, he referred to in shorthand as the “AGMOAS”: the avant-garde model of the artistic subject. The ‘Grease Works’ were an attempt to make works that modelled the artistic subject as a critique of the AGMOAS.

Grease is a polyvalent material: many different meanings have stuck to the works since they were first started in 1986. Volatile, daubed like wet paint into fixed compositional elements, grease continues to run during the exhibition, complicating boundaries between artistic media. Belonging to a threshold moment of our burgeoning techno-feudal era, a soft/hard material dyad was, for Atkinson, analogous to the software/hardware distinction in computer science. In the later ‘Grease Works’ the dissolution of boundaries became a metaphor for shifting global geopolitics.

GREASE AND ITS COHORTS is available to purchase below online and from Walther König bookstore, Cologne.