Accompanying a new major exhibition of contemporary artist Ed Atkins, this career-spanning publication assembles paintings, writings, embroideries and drawings alongside Atkins’s moving-image works in a succession of large-scale installations.

For over a decade, Ed Atkins has been making videos and animations that trace the dwindling gap between representation and embodied experience. Using his desires, experiences and body as a model, Atkins’s works misuse contemporary technologies of representation to critically reflect what they have done to images and our sense of self.

Troubled by melancholy, undermined by bathos and tempered with humour, his works pit a weightless digital life against a corporal world of craft and touch, allegorising profound experiences of loss, intimacy, and love.

This ambitious publication provides a radical survey of his career, assembling a wide range of paintings, writing, embroideries and drawings alongside the moving-image works for which he is best-known. Essays from leading scholars, authors and curators, alongside previously unpublished behind-the-scenes production photographs and a curated selection of new drawings collectively probe Atkins’ practice to ask: what kind of realism is at stake here?

Nathan Ladd is Curator, Contemporary Art, at Tate Britain. Polly Staple is former Director of Collection, British Art at Tate. Hal Foster is an American art critic and historian and has written widely on postmodernism, the avant-garde and aesthetic theory. He is Professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist and critic. He is the author of several full-length poetry collections including Art, Mean Free Path and Angle of Yaw. Kathryn Scanlan is an American award-winning author. She is best known for her works The Dominant Animal, Aug 9 – Fog and Kick the Latch. Jamie Stevens is a psychotherapist.