Ray Atkins Unseen

Nearly fifty years after his landmark Whitechapel exhibition, Ray Atkins Unseen reintroduces one of post-war Britain's most distinctive yet under-recognised painters. Reuniting important paintings from Atkins’ formative decades, including works omitted from the 1974 exhibition curated by Frank Auerbach, it offers a fresh perspective on an artist whose unwavering commitment to direct observation places him within a tradition of post-war British figurative painting.

The exhibition begins with paintings from Atkins’ foundational years at Bromley School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Returning to Bromley in 1959 to study under Auerbach before working in Auerbach’s life painting studio at the Slade, Atkins absorbed the legacy of David Bomberg’s teaching through an emphasis on structure, energy and the physicality of paint. These early works reveal an artist responding to the debates between academic naturalism and abstraction. Direct observation over extended periods of time results in considered pieces that emerge from deep reflection and express and capture the emotional environment, all rendered in thick application of paint.

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The White Hanging Sheet in Finchley Studio, Day 1965 124 x 194cm

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Following Atkins’ move to Reading in 1968, the exhibition traces how his observation-based method evolved to capture a new landscape and subject matter. The dense, structurally organised paintings of the 1950s and early 1960s gradually give way to a more open handling of paint, brighter colour and increasingly fluid brushwork. Railway embankments and the construction of roads and shopping centres became the foci of paintings that transformed everyday urban change into powerful explorations of structure and light. Throughout and between these works, glimpses of untamed nature emerge, positing a contrast between the natural world and the rapid transformation of the urban environment. Their documentary value, alongside their painterly ambition, led to many of these paintings being shown in the exhibition Ray Atkins: The Reading Years at Reading Museum in 2017.

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Snow, Back Garden, 32 Fonteney Road, Balham 1968 81 x 102cm

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The title Ray Atkins Unseen refers not only to paintings excluded from the Whitechapel exhibition, but also to Atkins’ own understanding of artistic practice. The exhibition features works painted in environments caught in the tension between seeing and being seen, suggesting that the quiet persistence with which Atkins developed his work also contributed to its relative obscurity. By bringing these paintings together for the first time, Ray Atkins Unseen invites a renewed appreciation of an artist whose work enriches our understanding of post-war British art.