PREVIEW: Ashley Bickerton-Seascapes at the End of History

Ashley Bickerton was an original member of Neo-Geo group, which emerged in New York during the 1980s. In 1993, he left New York for Bali, Indonesia, where his work took on a distinct tropical exoticism often in sharp contrast to his Neo-Geo work, which was an abstract and geometric exploration of consumerism and industrialization. Bickerton’s investigation of materiality has remained a consistent thread throughout his practice. Often blurring the boundaries between media, genre, and subject (photography and sculpture; portraiture and landscape; realism and fantasy), he challenges the parameters of art making, calling into question the value and significance of the art object itself.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

As part of its bold reappraisal of the seascape genre, Ashley Bickerton’s solo exhibition, entitled “Seascapes at the End of History”, features works from Bickerton’s “Ocean Chunk” series, which he first conceived of while living in New York City prior to his relocation to the Indonesian island of Bali in 1993. In a particularly elaborate, large-scale work from this series, “Hanging Ocean Chunk (To Be Dragged Up Cliff Faces, Strung Across Ravines, and Suspended From The Forest Canopy) 1” (2022), a square ocean chunk encased in stainless steel rails is suspended from the Lehmann Maupin’s gallery ceiling. Festooned with a panoply of accessories including carabiners, flags, coils of rope, and climbing equipment, the work suggests and provides for its own transportation through difficult terrain. Beyond its current gallery setting, Bickerton has prepared for possible future installations of this work on cliff faces, over gorges, and high in forest canopies. One of the exhibition’s most personal works, “Floating Family Footprints (Flow Tide) “  (2022), documents the trail of footprints left by the artist, his wife, and their child during one of their walks together on the beach. As in the “Ocean Chunk” series, Bickerton uses resin and fiberglass to create the impression of a surface of shimmering water, beneath which two sets of adult footprints are visible on either side of a smaller, toddler-sized set between them. Like other works in the exhibition, the work features a pair of flotation devices mounted onto the broad slab of preserved beach, indicating its potential use as a raft should the need arise. Offering another reinterpretation of seascapes, the exhibition also includes three works from Bickerton’s “Vector” series, which consists of mounted steel boxes containing flotsam and beach detritus that is visible through an etched glass surface. The interiors of these cases are mirrored so that the lines of flotsam appear to float in space and dance around the viewer, implicating their presence within the visual narrative. As they are equipped with stainless steel frames, rubber-grip handles, and fastened straps, the ultimate purpose of these objects remains undetermined, allowing them to appear as transportable survival modules as much as museum display cases. These works poetically elaborate upon the roles played by waterways within the human rearrangement of the elements, as detritus flows out of rivers and into the ocean, where it may swirl around for decades before being deposited back onto the shore. Far from being random or haphazard, the arrangement of the detritus within these box-like structures is based on Bickerton’s close attention to how such items are distributed by the tide as they wash upon beaches. Since his initial rise to prominence during the mid-1980s in New York Bickerton has often been associated with a group of artists called “Neo-Geo. His best-known works from this period exaggerate commercial forms and the visual language of branding, with their shining aluminum surfaces populated by corporate logos and other symbols. Bickerton’s early commodity-oriented works often take the form of boxes or crates bedecked with straps, industrial-looking installation hardware, and rolled sheets of neoprene. These components are intended to afford equal meaning to each station of the artwork’s existence, whether it is in storage, being transported, or on display. Many of these works also feature a logo for SUSIE, Bickerton’s own self-invented brand, which employs a traditionally female nickname as a surrogate for the artist’s signature—a deliberate choice to avoid the macho, paternalistic legacies of more obvious artistic forebears. Formally speaking, the new works included in “Seascapes at the End of History” represent something of a return to the industrial trappings of Bickerton’s creative output during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Photo: Ashley Bickerton, Yellow-Magenta Shark, 2021, Polyurethane resin, nylon, cotton webbing, stainless steel, scope, distilled water, coconuts, rope, 60 x 108 x 42 inches, © Ashley Bickerton, Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin

Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 501 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 27/1-5/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com