Tag: Ashley Bickerton

Ashley Bickerton at Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Bali-based American artist Ashley Bickerton has long painted tropical paradise inhabited by corrupt, non-idyllic characters.  Now, his nubile female stock character has morphed into a brightly made-up crone with a snaking tongue and necklaces of trash.  As disturbing as she is, it’s a bold new direction for Bickerton, who ups the ante with even stronger contrasts between attraction and repulsion.  (At Lehmann Maupin’s Lower East Side space through Oct 26th).   

Ashley Bickerton, MV1, aluminum, oil and acrylic paint, hair, cement, 2013 (foreground).  Ashley Bickerton, m-DNA_eve1, oil and acrylic on digital print on wood, 2013 (background).

Ashley Bickerton at Lehmann Maupin

This gruesome, one-eyed, blue cigarette bedecked creature with perfect teeth could be the patron deity of Bali-based Ashley Bickerton’s portraits of crazed hedonists.  At over seven feet high, the sheer profusion of color and ornament – from her bottle cap necklace to paint-smeared coral – is impressive.  (At Lehmann Maupin’s Lower East Side location through April 20th)  

Ashley Bickerton, White Head I, acrylic, digital print and plastic laminate on wood, 2012.

Ashley Bickerton in ‘I Followed You Into the Water,’ at Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Ashley Bickerton, 'Seascape: Floating Costume to Drift for Eternity I (Armani Suit), suit, glass, aluminum, wood, caulk, fiberglass, enamel, canvas and webbing, 1991.
Ashley Bickerton, ‘Seascape: Floating Costume to Drift for Eternity I (Armani Suit), suit, glass, aluminum, wood, caulk, fiberglass, enamel, canvas and webbing, 1991.

As far as self-portraits go, ‘Seascape:  Floating Costume to Drift for Eternity I (Armani Suit)’ by Ashley Bickerton is a little on the dark side, despite its bright orange buoys.  Made in 1991, just two years before this regular on the downtown New York art scene relocated permanently to Bali, it seems to foretell his departure.  Quixotic, a little lonesome, and stylishly branded by Armani and his signature ‘Susie’ logo – a semi-corporate brand of his own invention – Bickerton’s craft signals a dignified leave-taking, a memorial to a past life and an adventure about to begin. (Through August 17th at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Chelsea.)