Ashley Bickerton “The Eight Paintings”
Lehmann Maupin (536 W 22nd Street)
This event has ended.
Ashley Bickerton pushes further into his dystopic, end-times vision for his second solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery. The gallery will present a new group of Bickerton’s large-scale paintings called “The Eight Paintings” along with bronze sculptures. These new works are a fusion of painting, photography and sculpture and exude sexuality, exoticism and color.
The eerie quality of the green men from Bickerton’s earlier work has now given way to the raucous and psychedelic-hued adventures of his blue “20th Century-Man” as he navigates a world populated with shamelessly inflated women and littered with the wreckage of “existentialism” and “escapism.” Bickerton represents this world of abundance and sensual opulence while addressing his concerns as a painter.
He employs models and actors whom he paints on directly, then photographs numerous times. Bickerton then manipulates the images with a computer almost to the point of implausibility. These are printed onto canvas and altered further with paint. As a means to question the art object as commodity, these new paintings are displayed in elaborate hand-carved frames. While Paul Gauguin was searching for something intangible in the human spirit, with Bickerton we see a fin-de-siecle malady, and an almost artistic certainty that we are approaching the end of the road.
Media
Schedule
from March 20, 2008 to May 03, 2008