Flower

’I like eating cold, clammy wraps from big pharmacies that are open late and sell just a few foods like protein bars and powders.’ Flower is a book of realistic admissions, likes, dislikes, memories and no-brainer observations, treating personal truth as unavailable - something that must be made up and convincing. Taking cues from confessional literature, his daughter’s improvised games, poor internet writing and shitty AI, Ed Atkins, in his first work of non-fiction, equivocates between inanity and divinity, ease and pain, sentimentality and sterility. An anti-memoir, a list, a listless blur - Flower is a highly original, moving and absurd book by one of the most influential artists of his generation, formally inventive and disturbingly of our time.

Ed Atkins is a British artist based in Copenhagen. In recent years he has presented solo shows at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and Serpentine Gallery in London, among others, with a show at Tate Britain opening in spring 2025. His artwork is the subject of several monographs, and his writing has appeared in October, Texte zur Kunst, frieze, The White Review, Hi Zero and EROS Journal. Flower is his first work of non-fiction and his third book with Fitzcarraldo Editions after A Primer for Cadavers (2016) and Old Food (2019).