About
Ashley Bickerton (1959–2022) rose to prominence in the mid-1980s with a succession of ironic, abstracted constructions focused on questions of consumerism and identity. Establishing his own (pointedly “feminine”) brand, Susie, Bickerton manufactured knowingly impersonal “self-portraits,” juxtaposing his imaginary company’s logo with various real-world examples. The works’ corporate aura is further enhanced by their elaborate steel, leather, and rubber façades. He has also produced “still lives” incorporating digital screens that display their own fluctuating market value, satirizing art as the object of commercial speculation. And since relocating to the Indonesian island of Bali in the early 1990s, Bickerton has explored cultural dislocation in paintings and sculptures with an ornate, handcrafted aesthetic.
Bickerton was born on May 26, 1959, in Barbados. He received his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1982 and completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1985. The following year he was included, with Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, and Meyer Vaisman, in an exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery, New York, that helped cement his association with the city’s emergent Neo-Geo movement (though he felt a closer affinity with the contemporaneous Commodity Art and Neo-Conceptualist tendencies). Many of his works of the period—including such series as Abstract Painting for People (1986), Wall Wall (1986–88), and Landscape (1988)—have structures that suggest packing crates or carrying cases, alluding to prosaic function but lacking a clear purpose beyond self-promotion and self-protection.
In 1993, Bickerton’s work took a self-consciously “exotic” turn when he relocated to Bali. Its elaborate styling and tongue-in-cheek feel contrast sharply with the conceptual detachment of his previous output, though a slippage between mediums, genres, and subjects remains in evidence. Employing polished figuration to parody Western fantasies of a hypersexualized expat life, Bickerton depicts himself, his family, and his friends in lurid colors, introducing the grotesque “blue man” character as an archetypal European male in an “othered” tropical setting; he is, in the artist’s words, “lost and adrift in an alien twenty-first century, awash in a whole other set of sociocultural and psychological metrics—ones that he is clearly unable to grasp.”
Photo: courtesy Bickerton Studio
#AshleyBickerton
The Importance of Elsewhere: on Ashley Bickerton
This documentary film includes footage of Ashley Bickerton as he gives a tour of his Bali studio during his final year, as well as interviews with artists Matthew Barney, Mark Dion, Damien Hirst, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Jon Kessler, and writer Paul Theroux.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2023
The Spring 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Roe Ethridge’s Two Kittens with Yarn Ball (2017–22) on its cover.
Game Changer
Ashley Bickerton
Michael Slenske pays tribute to the life and work of artist Ashley Bickerton.
Bickerton’s “Bickertons” in the Realm of the Fetish
Abigail Solomon-Godeau analyzes periodization, artistic persona, and fetishism in the expansive work of Ashley Bickerton.
Truth Revealed: Damien Hirst and James Fox on Ashley Bickerton
In conversation with James Fox, Damien Hirst reflects on the artwork of his longtime friend.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Art Fair
Art Basel Hong Kong 2024
March 27–30, 2024
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
www.artbasel.com
Gagosian is participating in Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 with a selection of works by international contemporary artists. The works on view, which embrace a dizzying variety of subjects and approaches, see the participating artists identify fresh ways to disrupt established histories of abstraction and figuration, and instill sculptural and painterly representations of the natural world with complex cultural significance.
Sarah Sze, Turning and Turning, 2024 © Sarah Sze. Photo: Maris Hutchinson
Art Fair
ART SG 2024
January 19–21, 2024, booth BC06
Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Singapore
artsg.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in the second edition of ART SG, with a selection of works by international contemporary artists including Harold Ancart, Georg Baselitz, Ashley Bickerton, Amoako Boafo, Dan Colen, Edmund de Waal, Nan Goldin, Lauren Halsey, Hao Liang, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Tetsuya Ishida, Alex Israel, Donald Judd, Y.Z. Kami, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Rick Lowe, Takashi Murakami, Takashi Murakami & Virgil Abloh, Nam June Paik, Ed Ruscha, Jim Shaw, Alexandria Smith, Spencer Sweeney, Stanley Whitney, Jonas Wood, and Zeng Fanzhi. The works on view, which embrace a wide variety of subjects and approaches, find artists infusing traditional genres such as history painting, portraiture, and landscape with new and surprising ideas that traverse cultural and temporal boundaries.
Gagosian’s booth at ART SG 2024. Artwork, left to right: © ADAGP, Paris, 2024, © Jonas Wood, © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: Ringo Cheung
Screening and Talk
The Importance of Being Elsewhere
Films on Ashley Bickerton
Sunday, September 10, 2023, 3pm
Anthology Film Archives, New York
anthologyfilmarchives.org
Join Gagosian for a film screening and conversation in conjunction with Ashley Bickerton: Susie’s Mother Tongue, an exhibition of more than twenty-five paintings and sculptures by the artist at Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York. The evening will feature the premiere of The Importance of Being Elsewhere, a short documentary by director Thomas Nordanstad including footage of the artist in his Bali studio during his final year, as well as interviews with Matthew Barney, Damien Hirst, Jamian Juliano-Villani, and others. Looking for Something Beyond (2018), directed by Roddy Bogawa in collaboration with Bickerton, and The Love Story of Pythagoras Redhill (1981), made by Bickerton while a student at CalArts, will also be screened. Following the films, Bogawa, Juliano-Villani, and Nordanstad will discuss the artist’s life and practice and the legacy he leaves behind.
Still from The Importance of Being Elsewhere (2023), directed by Thomas Nordanstad. Artwork © Ashley Bickerton
Museum Exhibitions
Closed
The Greek Gift
June 22–October 31, 2021
DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, Greece
deste.gr
Coordinated by Massimiliano Gioni, this exhibition brings together a series of new and existing works alongside found objects and impromptu responses from a variety of artists who have maintained decades-long relationships with Dakis Joannou and the DESTE Foundation. Part divertissement and part collaborative project, the exhibition borrows its title from a chess tactic—the “Greek gift sacrifice.” Installed in the small, cavernous spaces of the Slaughterhouse, the works sit side by side like toys in a dollhouse. Work by Ashley Bickerton, Urs Fischer, and Christopher Wool is included.
Ashley Bickerton, Ocean Chunk: Indian Ocean/Aegean Sea, 2021, installation view, DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, Greece © Ashley Bickerton. Photo: Paris Tavitian
Closed
Ashley Bickerton in
Emerald City
March 28–May 31, 2018
chi art space and K11 Art Foundation Pop-up Space, Hong Kong
www.k11artfoundation.org
Beginning with basic geometric concepts that represent spatial relations, Emerald City examines the structures and meanings of the cosmos, land, and sea, architectural environments, the human body, and other physical and abstract spaces to shed light on the stories of cultural coexistence amid globalization. Bringing together works of contemporary art including paintings, videos, sculptures, and site-specific installations, the exhibition demonstrates how geometry shapes our conception of the world, while also inspiring us to look at the world outside the confines of geometric thinking. Work by Ashley Bickerton is included.
Installation view, Emerald City, K11 Art Foundation Pop-up Space, Hong Kong, March 28–April 22, 2018. Artwork, front: © Carl F. Cheng; back left and back right: © Ashley Bickerton; back middle: © Nik Kosmas. Photo: courtesy K11 Art Foundation
Closed
Brand New
Art and Commodity in the 1980s
February 14–May 13, 2018
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
hirshhorn.si.edu
Brand New focuses on the 1980s as the iconic decade when artwork became a commodity and the artist, a brand. This exhibition of nearly 150 works examines the origins and rise of a new generation of artists in New York who blurred the lines between art, entertainment, and commerce—a shift that continues to define contemporary art today. Work by Ashley Bickerton, Richard Prince, and Andy Warhol is included.
Ashley Bickerton, Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles) #2, 1988 © Ashley Bickerton
Closed
Ashley Bickerton
September 23–December 16, 2017
FLAG Art Foundation, New York
www.flagartfoundation.org
Ashley Bickerton’s vibrant and often dystopic vision of contemporary culture has been at the center of his four-decade-long practice, which includes painting, photography, sculpture, and every possible combination therein. This survey, the artist’s first in the United States, demonstrates the 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 the present, including Susie, Logos, Blue Man, Water Vector, and Wall-Wall, highlight his subversive and self-aware critique of identity, consumerism, and cultural artifice.
Installation view, Ashley Bickerton, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, September 23–December 16, 2017. Artwork © Ashley Bickerton. Photo: Steven Probert