Ocula Report Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber 15 Mar 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula In Meiro Koizumi's three-channel video installation, The Angels of Testimony (2019), the central frame features an interview with Hajime Kondo about his time as a solider of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conversation centres on war crimes perpetrated in China, including the beheading of Chinese prisoners for...
Ocula Conversation Diana Campbell Betancourt Diana Campbell Betancourt is a curator working predominantly across South and Southeast Asia. Since 2013 she has been the founding artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation and chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a transnational art event that has grown in size and scale ever since its first edition in 2012. Backed by...
Ocula Report Chinternet Ugly at Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art 7 Mar 2019 : Mike Pinnington for Ocula China, home to 802 million internet users, is subject to sophisticated online censorship. This shrouded state of affairs, unsurprisingly perhaps, serves to reinforce stereotypes around conformity elsewhere. Any realm, digital or otherwise, subject to such strict scrutiny must necessarily be bland and uncritical, right? I was mulling over such...
Ashley Bickerton completed studies at the California Institute of the Arts in 1982 before attending the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. Bickerton is known as one of the original members of the group of artists known as Neo-Geo, which also included artists such as Peter Halley and Meyer Vaisman.
Bickerton’s works are a combination of found objects, photographs, and painting. His works are colourful and figurative, yet with often grotesque connotations. His practice involves painting the bodies of his subjects then taking photographs which he manipulates in order to create his uncanny caricatures with disproportionate and unsettling features. Bickerton provides a dystopian view of humanity through his portraits of grotesque figures. His infamous ‘blue-man,’ often a self-portrait, is representative of the 20th century man who, in Bickerton’s works, is both a family man and a manic drug fiend.
Pieces produced during Bickerton’s time as an artist-in-residence at the STPI in 2006 have an almost nightmarish quality with monstrous-looking heads peering out from beneath the surface of water surrounded by debris. Bickerton’s move from New York to Bali in the 1990’s is a clear influence in his work. The frames of Bickerton’s works are made up of materials bought by the artist in Bali and recall Indonesian craft making.
Bickerton’s works are held in many international public collections including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate, London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Foundation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Berardo Collection Museum, Portugal; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Ashley BickertonCodswallop & Doggerel, 2019 Oil and acrylic on canvas
Ashley BickertonGirl With Green Shoulder, 2018 Oil and acrylic on canvas
Ashley BickertonApex Species, Apex Moment. Before The Fall. Mother., 2018 Oil and acrylic on canvas
Ashley BickertonSnake Head No.2, 2006 Etching, aquatint and relief print on STPI handmade paper
Ashley BickertonSnake Head No.4, 2006 Relief print by etched copper plate on STPI handmade paper
Ocula Insight James Page on Yogyakarta Art Lab By Elliat Albrecht Initiated by Singapore-based Gajah Gallery in 2012, Yogyakarta Art Lab (YAL) is a foundry and production house located in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. With a small staff expertly trained in a variety of metal production techniques, the lab's purpose is to engage international artists to experiment with new mediums in order to expand their practices....
Ocula Insight Ashley Bickerton 16 December 2015 In this Ocula Insight, Ashley Bickerton—who has lived in Bali for the last 22 years, but who came to the forefront of the art world as a central figure in New York’s vital East Village scene of the 1980s—discusses his work, and in particular how it has been influenced by both Bali and his time spent working at the Yogya Art...
Ocula Conversation Jasdeep Sandhu Founder, Gajah Gallery, Singapore In 1996, Jasdeep Sandhu established Gajah Gallery in Singapore with the purpose of promoting Southeast Asian Contemporary Art with an emphasis on Indonesian contemporary art. Now twenty years on the gallery is about to expand into a 6,000 square foot space in Tanjong Pagar Distripark in Singapore, and also recently opened a second exhibition...
Ocula Conversation Ashley Bickerton Artist, Bali In conversation with Ashley Bickerton he references David Ostrowski as a painter he follows. The reference is surprising as a type of erasure and emptiness often defines Ostrowski’s practice – a recent work shown at Simon Lee gallery featured just a spray of colour across the bottom of an otherwise white canvas. Bickerton’s...
Related Press Ashley Bickerton: Direct, enigmatic and in constant pursuit of profitable alienation... ArtReview : 1 July 2017 Boom! That's how Ornamental Hysteria, Ashley Bickerton's current exhibition at Damien Hirst's Newport Street Gallery, opens—with a box sporting an ominous red LED number-counter bolted to the wall. It's the kind of thing you can imagine the late Roger Moore briefly interrupting a moment of passion to rush and defuse during his 1970s/early-80s...
Related Press Where are they now? Tracking the Neo-geometric Conceptualists. LEAP Magazine : 4 April 2016 We live in a state of the perpetual present. With the revolving door of exhibitions in more and more venues, commercial and scholarly alike, thousands of artists appear on a relatively flat plane of aesthetics. This is good for a lot of things—fair art criticism among them—but it tends to hurt our understanding, as viewers, of where the...
Related Press Mutant Mystique—The STPI network Randian : 22 January 2016 Randian is in Singapore for Art Stage. As part of our coverage we are visiting a number of the institutions and galleries contributing to the emerging Singaporean and South East Asian art scene. In this article, we turn to Singapore’s STPIIf New York’s alter ego is Gotham City, then Singapore’s is more like a figment of...
Related Press Singapore Tyler Print Institute At Art Basel Miami Beach Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop for Artinfo / 03 December 2013 : 5 December 2013 For its first participation in Art Basel Miami Beach, the Singapore Tyler Print Institute is bringing a mix of Asian and international artists who have worked with its print workshop in the hope of appealing to a new American clientele.“It’s a good opportunity to present works by Asian artists to a new audience and our highlights...
