Representation-based classifiers (RCs) have attracted considerable attention in face recognition in recent years. However, most existing RCs use the mean square error (MSE) criterion as the cost function, which relies on the Gaussianity assumption of the error distribution and is sensitive to non-Gaussian noise. This may severely degrade the performance of MSE-based RCs in recognizing facial images with random occlusion and corruption. In this paper, we present a minimum error entropy-based atomic representation (MEEAR) framework for face recognition. Unlike existing MSE-based RCs, our framework is based on the minimum error entropy criterion, which is not dependent on the error distribution and shown to be more robust to noise. In particular, MEEAR can produce discriminative representation vector by minimizing the atomic norm regularized Renyi's entropy of the reconstruction error. The optimality conditions are provided for general atomic representation model. As a general framework, MEEAR can also be used as a platform to develop new classifiers. Two effective MEE-based RCs are proposed by defining appropriate atomic sets. The experimental results on popular face databases show that MEEAR can improve both the recognition accuracy and the reconstructed results compared with the state-of-the-art MSE-based RCs.