The first U.S. survey of Bali-based artist Ashley Bickerton illustrates the vibrant and often dystopic vision of contemporary culture at the center of his four-decade-long practice, which includes painting, photography, sculpture, and every possible combination therein. The survey demonstrates the extraordinary visual range of Bickerton’s oeuvre, which oscillates between playfulness and brutality, extreme beauty and the grotesque. Works from the artist’s signature series from the 1980s to present, including Susie, Logos, Blue Man, and new Water Vector and Wall-Wall works, highlight his subversive and self-aware critique of identity, consumerism, and cultural artifice.

Bickerton rose to prominence as part of the 1980s New York East Village art scene, with works that layered the reductive formalist aesthetic of minimalism with signs, symbols, and logos, as a means to examine commodity and value. In 1982, Bickerton concocted Susie, a personal trademark, which would be stamped onto his work for much of the next decade. Subverting the authority of the signature, Susie reduced the artist to a brand, alongside his use of logos and symbols such as Nike, Samsung, TV Guide, dollar signs, and skulls. As Bickerton stated “maybe somewhere in this circumscribed liberty of obvious, eccentric, contradictory, and choice-less choices we can pinpoint an individual. ‘Yes, I am a macrobiotic birdseed-swallowing disciple of the Marlboro Man, I like my liquor ‘rot gut’ and my TV highbrow, I wear American yokel underwear in icy Bauhaus furniture and I drive a crappy French car. Who am I?’”

The artist’s preoccupation with the end of the world (perhaps foreshadowing the end of his time in New York), was evidenced in Bickerton’s work from the late 1980s and early 1990s, which included flotation devices, portholes, ropes, carabiners, and biosphere escape hatches. These time capsules/idiosyncratic survival kits contain a variety of materials—cigarette butts, cheese puffs, alcohol, an Elvis costume, “Smoked Sturgeon, Salmon and Scallops With A Mild Horseradish Flavored Oil,” etc. – all preserved for an eventual apocalypse.

Bickerton decamped from New York in 1993, eventually settling in the surfer’s paradise of Bali, which resulted in a dramatic shift in his practice and style. Working in an increasingly figurative and self-reflective mode, the artist used himself, his family, fellow expats, and prostitutes as models for hyper-realistic paintings, which depicted an increasingly acerbic view of humanity. Bickerton parodied do-gooding society types, contrived and idealized self and family portraiture, western fantasies of island expat life, and the mythological role of the artist. This led to the creation of bizarre, composite alter egos, such as Blue Man and Snake-Headed Man, as well as a tongue-in-cheek version of himself in the likeness of Paul Gauguin. In seeking further freedom to create his maximalist compositions, Bickerton began staging elaborate sets, painting directly onto people and objects that he would photograph and digitally alter. Local, artisanally crafted frames, inlaid with mother of pearl and hand-carved coconut shells, complete these complex satires.

Whereas Bickerton’s early works tackle form, function, and communication, with sometimes single words acting as the entire painting, his later figurative pieces are visually deafening, with bright color and cluttered objects mirroring the over-the-top excess featured as the work’s subject. Newly created Wall-Walls refer to an earlier series from the 1980s, and attest to Bickerton’s continued interest to mine and recontextualize a cohesive cadre of themes over time. He states “in a long and often breathless career, I feel I’ve pursued every reckless tangent with utterly no fidelity to any stylistic cohesion, but nevertheless in this tangle I knew inherently there was a larger overarching language that was distinctly my own. The project of the last several years has been to try to come full circle and in the process unearth that language, to give it shape and cadence, and understand how it has run through the work, clear and unadulterated from the beginning. The Wall-Walls turned out to be the key that unlocked it all.”

About:

Ashley Bickerton (b. 1959, Barbados, West Indies) is an artist living and working in Uluwatu, Bali. Bickerton graduated from California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita, CA, in 1982, and continued his education in the Independent Studios Program (ISP) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, in 1985. Bickerton has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions, including The Newport Street Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2017); Almanach 16, Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2016); among others. His work has been featured in major institutions, including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2012); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2012); Victoria & Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom (2011); New Museum, New York, NY (2010), among others. Bickerton’s work has been included in prominent international biennales, including the 9th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (1992); the 44th Venice Biennale (1990); and the 1989 Whitney Biennial. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; among others.

Ashely Bickerton was organized by The FLAG Art Foundation with the generous support of the artist, institutional and private lenders, and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

#AshleyBickerton

“Bickerton’s art, full of bright colors and slick surfaces, can seem like simplified riffs on consumer culture. But when seen as part of a longer, multifaceted practice of art, his work holds deep truths about the experience of being human and the choices we make and those that are made for us.”

— Christine Cocca, The Jakarta Post

“…Ashley Bickerton’s first U.S. survey dedicated to his multimedia work serves as a compact retrospective of his four-decade long career, shaped by various geographical and ideological milestones that show a continued response to the artist’s ongoing quest for meaning and space for contemplation in modern age.”

— O.C. Yerebakan, Art Observed

“I think that’s been part of the work, yes. In a sense, I’ve always felt out of context, like I don’t belong anywhere, so I always think of myself as an outsider, and what I do reflects that.”

— Ashley Bickerton, Time Out New York

“A painting of a young, blue-skinned family strolling the beach in leis and saris is a “family portrait”, he said. It’s not a boring “painting about painting”, he said, even though it happens to contain many of the attributes of great paintings: “sexuality, colour, exoticism, escape, romance”.”

— The Art Newspaper