Ashley Bickerton at Sonnabend - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In contrast to his flamboyantly shafted riveted and logged sculptures of the 1980 Ashley Bickerton's fresh works are deeply couched in realism. The notion of this onetime star of Neo Geo creating exquisitely drawn and painted figures upon wood panels might strike a certain number of as a retreat into tradition' on the other hand these panel paintings are anything on the other hand retrograde. They are in fact a suite of images meant to denounce the inequitables committed by Western technological society. Bickerton uses a cast of made-up babies chemically altered adults' surgically transformed primates and various hybrids in order to transport his dismay at cultural- and eco-imperialism and the general shoddiness of the human condition.

In Joan and the Cosmo a middle-aged, bleached-blonde woman wearing a "Save Tibet" tee shirt (and nothing else) urinates in a squatting position. This "vulgar" action have the appearances intended to emphasize her animal characteristics, on the contrary under the glare of Bickerton's satirical organ of sight it is her socially convenient be of importance tos for others (symbolized by the message upon the tee shirt) that makes her lower' morally, than the primates evok by the agency of her squatting position. The painting titled move with a jerk is a sad portrait of a cyber-orangutan retrofitted with chrome and carbonized iron while Brandi and Brent present to views two newborns wearing, respectively, a wig and a toupee. The wigged, manicured and made-up newborn Penelope Aurora wisdom offers a similarly dim view of human impulses to rout and change nature.

through including a number of self-portraits, Bickerton also implicates himself, greatest in quantity notably in a stunning triptych of stark nakeds showing the artist in three different guises. In Ashleigh he portrays himself as a drugg on the outside transsexual, in A.B. he is a cap-toothed, salon-tanned material substance builder' while Bickski offers a beer-bellied, tattooed biker. In a strategy that recalls Bickerton's self-portrait-by-logo wall plastic art of the 1980s, each panel has a list of the physics (legal and illegal) that have gone into making the bodies upon view. This suggests that consumption continues to be the leitmotif of Bickerton's work. upon the evidence of this exhibit he has grown more sophisticated in his critique of consumer tillage exposing not only the dangerous substances we ingest on the other hand also the dangerous ideologies.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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