Ashley Bickerton

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.”