ASHLEY BICKERTON

Gajah Gallery is proud to present Bali based American artist Ashley Bickerton’s first solo show at the gallery, on view at 140 Hill Street, #01-08, Old Hill Police Station from 26 April – 25 May 2014.

This exhibition marks a new direction for the American master of philosophical funk: large (two meters plus) paintings on canvas of vignettes from the tropical apocalypse, executed with a fine, finished polish. In the recent past Bickerton has created elaborate assemblages that approached deep-relief sculpture, high-resolution digital photographs overlaid with found objects and heavy impasto. Yet the artist has always been first and foremost a painter: With the new series he makes a conscious, almost defiant effort to re-establish himself as a master painter in the grand tradition.

Junk Anthropologies puts the focus on the image — and what provocative imagery it is. Bickerton, a resident of Bali since 1993, has witnessed the ongoing corruption of this medieval agrarian society from the inside. One of the central works in his new show is an hommage to Gauguin (a perennial obsession), a dual portrait of beautiful young Balinese women, their bare skin coated in gleaming aluminum paint, who wear coronas of brilliantly coloured flowers and pose with a platter of luscious tropical fruit. Alluring and desirable, of course, yet the figures are poised on the edge of irreality and permeated with an aroma of incipient rottenness. In the canvas that gives the exhibition its title, Bickerton quotes Gauguin directly, with a meticulously rendered copy of the French master’s iconic Tahitian Landscape that floats like a cloud beside the radiant silver nude. The paintings in Junk Anthropologies will seduce the viewer’s eye even as it challenges the mind with a fine, dense web of ironies.