Terry Atkinson

Terry Atkinson began working on the Enola Gay series in the late 1980s, taking as its subject the genre of the monochrome. Each painting in the series comprises a wooden board painted in a single, all-encompassing plane of colour, on to which a faint silhouette of an aeroplane is added, at times so subtle that it is barely recognisable as such.The particular B29 aircraft, infamously dubbed the Enola Gay, made history dropping the atomic bomb "Little Boy" on Hiroshima in 1945, symbolizing the immense power and consequences of human technological progress. By incorporating this historical event into the realm of avant-garde painting, Atkinson redirects the reading and reception of the work. The colour field gains depth as it becomes a horizon, inviting contemplation of the historical backdrop against which modernist art emerged.

In 1991, Atkinson wrote of the Enola Gay works: “In the present state of the work, the use of the Enola Gay motif is a bit like using a franking machine, or a postmark. It has come to identify the works not only formally, but if and when the image of the plane becomes known as an image of the particular B29 that delivered Little Boy to Hiroshima, then the historical drama of the event depicted is stamped upon the surface of the work; albeit through a fairly innocuous formal motif upon the monochromatic surface. (...) It was in this sense a remaindering out of the monochrome genre as a kind of carrier of blatant pictorial historiography.”

Terry Atkinson (b. 1939 in Yorkshire, UK) studied at Slade School of Fine Art and was one of the founding members of Art & Language in 1968, as part of which he exhibited at documenta 5 (1972) curated by Harald Szeemann. After leaving the collective in 1974, Atkinson went on to exhibit at the Venice Biennale in 1984 and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1985. He lives in Leamington Spa, England with his wife, Sue Atkinson, with whom he has frequently collaborated.