Ashley Bickerton

This lavishly illustrated career survey of the work of Ashley Bickerton provides unprecedented insight into the artist's life and art. As one of the loose collection of New York artists, including Haim Steinbach and Jeff Koons, whose work inspired the appellation "Neo-Geo," Bickerton first rose to prominence in New York in the mid-1980s with vibrant abstract works infused with a sardonic critique of consumer culture. These gave way in the early 1990s to tropically derived pieces redolent of concern for thenatural environment. The artist's move, in 1993, to the surfer's paradise of Bali, Indonesia, occasioned the development of a richly hued aesthetic that has found expression in diverse paintings, sculptures, and photographs. Combining the fantastically exotic with the troublingly nightmarish, Bickerton's evocative work continues to evolve. Throughout this eclectic monograph, the artist's own commentary is interwoven with text from additional contributors, including essays by fellow artist Jake Chapman, novelist Nick McDonell, art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau, curator Dominic Molon, and the artist's father, the noted linguist-anthropologist Derek Bickerton. Also included is an interview with Bickerton conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of London's. Serpentine Gallery, presented in the form of a comic novel with illustrations by graphic artist Ignacio Noé. This book, designed by Stefan Sagmeister in close collaboration with the artist, is a striking work of art in its own right, featuring a fold-out poster, die-cut pages and more than 300 colour illustrations.

In a lively reinterpretation from an interview transcript, Serpentine Gallery Co-Director, Hans Ulrich Obrist's conversation with Ashley Bickerton is remodelled as a graphic novel set in the red light district of an anonymous Eastern metropolis. Originally conducted in the Groucho Club, Obrist is portrayed as a fictional character, the pair are seen conversing in bars and moving through colourful streets and strip clubs as they discuss Bickerton's early ambitions to be a writer, his passion for surfing, island life and dialects of the English language, amongst a host of other interests and influences. An extensive anecdotal discussion and narrative leads the reader through the artist's varied life.

This book catalogues recent works by the Bali-based artist Ashley Bickerton. The works will be exhibited at White Cube, London from April to May 2009.Ashley Bickerton contends the popular global construction of the tropics as perfec- tion, where surfing, drugs and parties in beachside tourist villas provide a homoge- nised experience of the exotic. Living on the island of Bali, he parodies this drunken myopia in his photocollages and sculp- tures, presenting such glut and excess as an artifice. Just as Gauguin 'sampled' Poly- nesian exotica, so do Bickerton's carica- tures perform ideas of the tropical. An in- troductory essay by Nick Stillman highlights these themes in Bickerton's work, while the artist's conversation with artist, curator and writer Harland Miller explores the idea of the island as man, home and retreat.