Ashley Bickerton: Joyfully Discordant Paintings

Ashley Bickerton 1959-2022, Barbados Follow +

Since the 1980s, Bali-based artist Ashley Bickerton has merged different media, genres, and subjects as a means of questioning the fetishisation of art and its production.

The result has been an eclectic body of work, joyfully discordant in its approach to some of the darker aspects of culture and its commoditisation.

This finely tuned hybridisation features in his latest ‘Flotsam Series’ (2021), now showing at Lehmann Maupin in New York. It is his first exhibition with the gallery’s New York outpost since 2013, and in the city since his solo show at The Flag Foundation in 2017.

Pulled onto Bali’s shores by its surrounding ocean, the flotsam in these paintings was collected by Bickerton and arranged into the same fluid formations as they were left by the receding waves.

Set against vibrant, textured backgrounds, Bickerton has assembled the detritus into reimagined landscape paintings, calling into question human impact on the environment.

Framed by wood crates, Bickerton references shipping crates along with his signature commentary on the commodetisation of art.

The exhibition follows his solo exhibition at Gajah Gallery in Singapore in January 2021—one of his most comprehensive surveys to date—with a further solo exhibition set to take place in early 2022 in New York, once more at Lehmann Maupin.—[O]

Main image: Ashley Bickerton, Padang Moon (2020) (detail). Beach flotsam, oil and acrylic on canvas with plywood. 171 x 227 x 14.7 cm. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.