Gagosian Gallery now represents artist Ashley Bickerton – ARTnews.com

Gagosian, the world’s largest gallery, will now represent artist Ashley Bickerton, who first came to prominence as part of the Neo-Geo movement on New York’s East Village scene in the 1980s. He will have his first exhibition with Gagosian in New York Space next year.

“When I look at his wall pieces from the ’80s, they look as modern today as they were back then,” said Gagosian Senior Principal Kara Vander Wig who edited a study on the artist published in 2015. Work like that ever since. He was really making a lot of influences – corporate American, minimalism, pop art – in this work and he has continued to do that with other bodies of work that he has done since then.”

As part of this exclusive arrangement, Bickerton will leave his long-running show Lehmann Maupin, which he debuted in 2006 and had a solo show earlier this year.

“It was the hardest decision I ever made — that’s for sure,” Bickerton said of leaving Lehmann Maupin.

Gallery exhibitions dedicated to Stephen Barrino, an artist who grew up in New York’s East Village at the same time as Bickerton and a close friend of the artist, helped seal the deal for Bickerton.

“Larry saw the whole thing — the dimensions, the shape, how it would turn out,” Bickerton said. “It was so impressive how he foresaw that and fleshed it out, and I feel like he’d do something similar with me.”

Over the years, Bickerton’s art has been defined by a spirit that is intentionally difficult to define. “It’s ironic – if you put the work through my career together, it looks like a group show,” he said in an interview with Zoom from his Bali home. “But the truth is, I don’t think it’s changed at all. My inner motives have always been constant, and the stylistic pull I’m wearing is just a showcase of my style. I deliberately dive into stylistic overtones that contrast with those I did before.”

Works associated with Neo-Geo (or New Engineering Concepts) were primarily sculptural and commented on consumption and industrialization, particularly in the United States, and can be read in part as a reaction to decade surplus. (They were classified as “commodity art” during the 1980s, though the term did not adhere.) Bickerton developed his own personal brand, SUSIE, whose logo he placed alongside those of companies such as Renault, Marlboro, Nike, and Motorola. He called these works self-portraits.

From there, after moving to Bali in 1993, he made a radical journey, painting portraits in vibrant colours, as a way to emulate the Western expectations of an artist who moved to Southeast Asia, like Gauguin before him. His work has since returned to the sinister sculptural pieces for which he first became famous.

“I am now much closer to where I was in the ’80s,” he said. “That’s because I didn’t like how my career had branched out because of viewership.”

His motivation has always been to address the contemporary moment. “I want to be able to process whatever the hell is going on in the world: a bad breakup, or a beautiful sight, or a sensitive moment, or a craving, or some political outrage sweeping the nation.”

outside New York

Born in Barbados in 1959, when it was still a colony of the British Empire, and raised in various tropical locations, Bickerton moved from New York to Bali nearly 30 years ago, looking for a warmer climate. “When New York bothered me, as I did, I followed my inclinations elsewhere,” he said. “I didn’t want to sit around New York like so many ghosts I saw in editorials. It wasn’t up to me, and I could barely take the New York winters when I was full of optimism and things were going well.”

Another reason he felt his connection to the East Village scene – and especially his connection to Koons and Halle – kept following it. “It was painful,” he said. “No, I wanted my own way. I didn’t want this to be a legacy. Now, it doesn’t bother me too much.”

“Ashley is someone who responds to his environment, whether it’s New York or Indonesia – it becomes part of his language,” Vander Weig said. “He is also someone who incorporates his history into work. He is always thinking, he is always developing, he is always trying new things, pushing the material.”

Although Bickerton has never had a proper museum retrospective (anywhere in the world), he recently surveyed his work at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in London in 2017. A related show has been held at the Flag Art Foundation in New York later that year.

In an email, Hurst said that when he first saw Bickerton’s art in the ’80s, “It totally blew me away. It inspired and opened me up to what art can be, and how confrontational it can be in terms of ideas and materials. Ashley’s works are from their time but are Immortal, his questions and thoughts remain with you and grow in your mind in ways that only great art can.”

Bickerton has continued to inspire a younger generation of artists, including Jordan Wolfson, who said in an email, “Ashley continues to be one of the most important artists of his generation and his work continues to influence my generation, previous generations and others. His work has had a huge and acute impact on his testimony to culture.” … the power of the artist’s work to remain always present if not futuristic is astonishing.”

Noting that both Hirst and Wolfson appear with Gagosian, Vander Weg said, “The great thing about Ashley’s work is that it connects generations. It doesn’t speak to just one generation of artists.”

With this new move to Gagosian, Bickerton said he hopes his upcoming show in 2023 will help “re-contextualize” his art by presenting his historical work alongside newer series as well as some very new pieces, which are still in progress. Bickerton said his studio is currently expanding the paintings on a large scale.

During the pandemic, Bickerton was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis “so I’m fighting a battle for time too.” (He indicated that his transition to Gagosian had nothing to do with his latest diagnosis, and would have happened anyway.)

Bickerton continued, “What I have noticed is that no matter what work you do, it will always be seen from the perspective of your condition. My last performance was seen naturally from the perspective of my yard—staring into the infinity. The work I do now is perhaps more than that. There is something What a ghost about it. I have no problem talking about it, but I don’t want to be known or judged by this.”