In the 1980s Ashley Bickerton conquered the New York art world, leading a pack of artists who included Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach in the neo-geo movement, a style that critiqued rampant consumerism. His series of aluminium-and-steel wall sculptures Tormented Self-Portraits (1987-88), lacquered with corporate logos from Fruit of the Loom to Citibank, became totemic of this get-rich-quick era.
Bickerton, who has died aged 63 from complications related to motor neurone disease, knew, however, that such celebrity was fickle and, to the astonishment of many, in 1993 upped sticks to Bali.
There he embarked on a new chapter in his art, far from the eyes of critics and curators. “You just get processed like a taxonomical artefact, like some butterfly with a pin through it,” Bickerton said of museums and art journals. “You get labelled, indexed and committed to some construction of ‘historic record’, and then it all moves on again. It’s stifling in every sense.”
Instead, inspiration came from more prosaic sources: on a bus travelling up to Acapulco during a trip to Mexico, Bickerton saw a brick wall painted orange and purple. “It was perfect … what could be more perfect than a coloured wall to sit on a [gallery] wall.” It resulted in a series of steel, aluminium and resin sculptures, titled Wall-Wall, and featuring primary-coloured brick-like blocks and vinyl text poetically describing natural landscapes. As he sat on the shore with his wife while the tide was going out near their home, the ocean gave up a huge amount of flotsam, natural and human rubbish. That detritus said everything he wanted to say concerning man’s relationship with both capital and nature. His Flotsam Paintings ended up as dystopian reimaginings of the seascape genre, with bits of collected garbage embedded in the turquoise oil paint.
Island life did not blunt the artist’s social satire. Later Bickerton, once described by the writer Paul Theroux as “the connoisseur of not belonging”, embarked on a series of paintings featuring the character of the “Blue Men”, repugnant expat westerners. Their skin tone is a knowing nod to the exoticism of Paul Gauguin’s 19th-century Tahitian paintings.
In PST2 (2018), Bickerton shows an obese man guffawing on a moped while two miserable local women ride on the back; in The Bar (2018), two men sit at a table littered with empty beer bottles as women smoke, bored, by their side. Each jute canvas sits in a kitschy wooden frame inlaid with mother of pearl. “My work has always been about identity in some form,” Bickerton said. “But, given my unfashionable age, race, gender and orientation, it’s not really been encouraged to be seen or discussed that way.”
Conceived on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Bickerton was born in Barbados; his mother, Yvonne, was a behavioural psychologist, and his father, Derek Bickerton, was a peripatetic linguist renowned for his study of creole and pidgin languages. His parents eschewed the international schools favoured by other expats and put him in local schools. “My brother and I were often the only white kids in our school, in Africa, in the Caribbean, and in Guyana in South America … Over the course of my childhood I ended up speaking five dialects of English, none of which was comprehensible to the next.”
In 1971 the family finally settled in Hawaii, where Ashley perfected his surfing skills. When he was 21, with American citizenship, he enrolled on the fine art course at the California Institute of the Arts.
In 1984 Bickerton moved to New York, where he had his first solo exhibition, a series of text paintings, at White Columns, before undertaking the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art a year later. Although he was featured in a group show in 1986 at the Sonnabend Gallery with Koons, Peter Halley and Meyer Vaisman, Bickerton’s disillusionment with the industry was growing. Donald Judd’s boxes, he complained, were “discussed in terms of a vessel that held God. But what was it in the end? It was a fucking name brand. These things are traded in some pissing contest among oligarchs.” Later he asked: “What the hell was I doing locking myself into an insular feedback loop that lived only to mutely reflect a societal moment?”
Bickerton moved first to the Brazilian state of Bahia, but the waves were not good enough and it proved too difficult to make art, so instead he went to Bali, building a studio on a mountain near Uluwatu on the Indonesian island. When not surfing he made art, and in 1997 he showed four paintings in a solo exhibition at White Cube in London, including The Patron, which depicted a slobbish art collector slumped on a sofa masturbating. He had regular commercial gallery shows at the London dealer from then on, as well as in New York with Sonnabend and Lehmann Maupin. More recently Bickerton was represented by Gagosian, but institutional recognition largely passed him by, with just a few turns in museum group shows over the decades.
In 1994, however, Damien Hirst curated Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away ... at the Serpentine Gallery, London, a group exhibition meditating on life and death that travelled to museums in Helsinki, Hanover and Chicago. Having himself pickled a shark in formaldehyde a year earlier, Hirst included a sculpture by Bickerton titled Solomon Island Shark, made that year, which, with tongue-in-cheek exotica, featured a rubber replica of the giant fish hoisted on a rope and covered in coconuts.
Hirst, whom Bickerton considered an “obnoxious little monster” before they became friends, was to intervene again in Bickerton’s career 23 years later, when the British artist opened Newport Street Gallery, a non-profit space in London. Bickerton’s 2017 retrospective there was quickly followed by an even larger survey later that year at the Flag Art Foundation in New York. The audiences for these shows were divided. “There are those who loved what I did in New York in the 80s and early 90s, and they think I lost the plot when I ran off to Indonesia,” Bickerton said. “An equal number of people knew the work I’d done subsequent to coming to Bali and who saw my earlier work and went, ‘Hmm, boring’.” In truth, while varied, both eras were united by a wicked humour and anthropological interest in how people interact with their environment.
Bickerton is survived by his wife, Cherry Saraswati, daughter, Io, and two sons, Django and Kamahele, as well as his brother, James, and sister, Julie.
• Ashley Bickerton, artist, born 26 May 1959; died 30 November 2022
