Ornamental Hysteria
Ashley Bickerton
Newport Street Gallery
21 APRIL - 20 AUGUST 2017
Free
Born and bred in Barbados, Bickerton spent his upbringing moving around the world a lot. The diversity of Bickerton’s upbringing is reflected in the diversity of his work and mediums he chooses to use, including photo collage, appropriated image, digital image, paint and sculpture. Bickerton refuses to abide by one classic artform, believing painting to be too surreal, whilst photography too clinical “only in their combination do I find comfort”. (All photographs pictured here are from Gallery 2 and 5).
Once I had arrived at the Bickerton exhibition, I started questioning why I was there, or if I was indeed at the correct venue. Surrounding me in Gallery 1 were large boxes with company logos printed on them, apparently symbolising the commodification of culture prevalent in 1980s New York. These aesthetically neat and satisfying works (I guess) explore themes around how our identity can become lost in popular culture. The ideas are explained (sort of) in the free guidebook given to you upon arrival, but to be honest the whole concept was lost on me and these industrial box works wouldn’t have looked out of place in a warehouse alley.
Galleries 3 and 4 were equally disappointing – a supposed display of ‘seascapes’ and ‘landscapes’ showing the artist’s yearning to escape the urban environment. These were as underwhelming as the industrial boxes, and left me questioning exactly what I was supposed to be getting from Bickerton… Interestingly, however, alternative reviews I have read have disagreed entirely – favouring these works in particular, and claiming that the rooms to follow were a complete disaster.
Gallery 2 and 5 are the only reason that this exhibition has scored 4 stars – in fact, if they were on their own, the exhibition would have got full marks. Gallery 2 depicts Bickerton’s challenges to contemporary portraiture. We see him as a 5 headed snake-like beast, each face more disturbed than the last. The sculpture is excellently formed and quite obviously required a lot of skill on part of the artist. It also takes us directly away from the vanity of the modern world: exposing us to our uglier, truer selves – the beast which lies within.
Gallery 5 is a masterpiece. An explosion of aesthetic, colour and life, it’s as if you pick up energy just by walking into it. Bickerton’s hyperreal paintings depict heavily made up models, who are then photographed, digitally distorted, and then printed on canvas to be re-painted. The works quite literally jump out at you, as they also contain different textures and levels on the canvas. Themes prevalent here are ecological disaster, the damage of tourism, and reality of life in the sex industry.
Bickerton wants to destroy the idea of paradise: having grown up in Barbados, he was able to see the true effects of mass tourism on tropical islands, and witnessed the devastation firsthand. There is a sculpture in which the 5 snake heads we saw in Gallery 2 are submerged in a pool of human waste – litter, slime and general gunk. This is to show how we are destroying ourselves in our carelessness for the planet: drowning in our own toxic trash.
Bickerton often places himself within his work – as the blue man. His works from this time in his life are undoubtedly what stole the show. Not only are they meaningful, provocative and stunning, but they are also pretty damn cool. The blue man rides on a motorcycle with some young women dressed in tiki skirts, or he is seen to be completely off his nut in what appears to be some kind of brothel, filled with some more beautiful ladies and the odd hidden penis. Bickerton’s works manage to be a lot of fun, whilst exploring controversial and serious themes.
Some of Bickerton’s work is fantastic, other work’s make me want to poke my eyes out with two sticks. Luckily for him, the fantastic is really fantastic, which outshines the less interesting and engaging. Ornamental Hysteria is really an exhibition not to be missed – purely for the purpose of seeing Gallery 2 and 5, which are unlike anything I have seen before.
OVERALL RATING: ****
https://www.newportstreetgallery.com/exhibitions
