Charles Atlas
An exhibition of films by Charles Atlas are on view at Champ Lacombe in London through December 12, 2026. Alongside the presentation at Champ Lacombe, film stills by Atlas are continued beyond the gallery into the city, across nine billboards at various public sites across London.
The exhibition at Champ Lacombe features fifteen works by Atlas, with the earliest works on view dating from 1970. Presented together, these works show Atlas’ early seminal experiments and his later engagement with performance all belonging to a single, consistent and entirely singular practice. The billboards feature stills of Atlas’ Mayonnaise Number One (1973), a silent work first shot on 16mm film. Conceived as the first of a planned series of filmic portraits after Édouard Manet, it restages The Boy with Cherries (1858) as a tableau vivant. Douglas Dunn, with whom Atlas has worked consistently throughout his career, sits before a burgundy velvet backdrop beside a sawhorse piled with red fruit. Atlas gave him a single rule: he could move as he pleased, so long as one elbow stayed on the sawhorse. Encountered in passing, Douglas Dunn’s unwavering gaze meets the public directly, and the film’s intimacy, staged as a private moment, is offered to the street. Seen one by one as the viewer moves through the city, the frames echo the film’s own sequence of shifting poses and turns London into a stage for Atlas’ choreographic camera.
Billboard stills from:
Charles Atlas, featuring Douglas Dunn
Mayonnaise Number One, 1973, 16 mm film, silent, 11:08 Performer: Douglas Dunn
After The Boy with Cherries, 1858 by Édouard Manet
Billboard sites:
Castlehaven Road, Camden, London NW1 8RA
York Way / Freight Lane, Camden, London N1C 4BE
71 Mare Street, Hackney, London E8 4RG
79A Eastway, Hackney Wick, London E9 5JH
431 New Cross Road / Mornington Road, Lewisham, London SE14 6TD
199 New Cross Road, Lewisham, London SE14 5DH
1 Mepham Street, Waterloo Station Arches, Lambeth, London SE1 8FS
Vauxhall Cross / Harleyford Road, Lambeth, London SE11 5AX
13 Shepherd’s Bush Green, Hammersmith & Fulham, London W12 8PH
To learn more about the exhibition and billboards, please visit the Champ Lacombe website.