Kevin Atkinson – Art and life provides an indispensible introduction to Atkinson, a major figure in the story of South African art, art history and art education. Emerging in the 1960s, Atkinson gained a formidable reputation as a daring and forward-thinking artist fully engaged by his South African context and the plurality of ideas and styles that characterised international contemporary art from the mid-1940s. His remarkable output, which encompasses drawing, printmaking, painting, sculpture, environments and performance, is the expression of an artist who, in his own words, was “in time, on time, all the time”. Atkinson’s tenure as a teacher, particularly at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, where he was once a student, also informs his considerable legacy.
