Toxic Atomic is a multidisciplinary group exhibition exploring, in diverse ways, the relationship between colour, materials, toxicity and artistic imprint in the age of the Anthropocene.

Historically, the properties of pigments and toxicity have often been inextricably linked. Colour can serve as an index of materiality, or have associative connotations, the repercussions of which may retain impact and significance from one century to another. Colour can act as a residual marker staining physical and psychical landscapes. The works in the exhibition challenge and complicate an engagement with colour and materials, referencing in different ways, the historical and contemporary implications of colour from the green gas of World War I to the political imprint of international orange and the ubiquitous use of plastics, metallic spray paints, expanding foam and detritus from everyday life.

All artists in this exhibition identify as painters but work in diverse media suggestive of a state frequently referred to as a ‘post, post medium condition’, referencing, in part, Rosalind Krauss’ proposition to bury the term ‘medium’ like so much “toxic waste”. It is somewhere in this space of expansive materiality and the conceptual connection to discipline that the works speak of an unfolding of fluid ideas and processes, yet suggest a recognition of responsibility for the residual and permanent imprint we make in the age of the Anthropocene.