Ashley Bickerton - Contemporary Evening Sale London Tuesday, July 1, 2014 | Phillips
  • Provenance

    Sonnabend Gallery, New York
    Private Collection

  • Exhibited

    New York, Sonnabend Gallery, Ashley Bickerton, 1991
    New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Mind Over Matter, 2 October 1990 – 9 January 1991
    Gainesville, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Inner Eye: Contemporary Art, March 22, 1998 – January 3, 1999, then travelled to Knoxville, Knoxville Museum of Art (Spring 1999), Athens, University of Georgia, 9 July 1999 – 5 September 1999, Norfolk, The Chrysler Museum of Art (Fall 1999), Purchase, Neuberger Museum, 30 January - 16 April 2000
    Peekskill, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Origins, 13 September 2008 – 26 July 2009

  • Literature

    Mind Over Matter, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1991, p. 32 (illustrated)
    Inner Eye: Contemporary Art, exh. cat., Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, 2000, p. 18 (illustrated)
    Origins, exh. cat., Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, 2009, n.p. (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    This defiant, industrial wall-sculpture, Stratified Landscape #3, illustrates Ashley Bickerton’s interest in blurring the boundaries between sculpture
    and commodity. The artist’s career-long process of experimenting with the hybridisation of forms and materials create object-based sculptures,
    or ‘Culture-scapes’, where desolate constructions appear to withstand apocalyptic devastation.

    During the 1980’s Bickerton embarked on the ‘Neo-Geometric Conceptualism’ movement alongside Jeff Koons, Peter Halley and Meyer
    Vaisman. Abbreviated to ‘Neo-Geo’, it was fuelled by a critical assessment of America’s obsession with capitalist consumerism. Challenging the
    dominant culture of the time, Bickerton appropriated and parodied popular images and labels from consumer culture, indebted to Pop art,
    suggesting the over-consumption of American society. The art critic David Rimanelli commented in 1994 that Bickerton works of this period “were
    perhaps the most concisely sarcastic integration of Pop and institutional critique in a sarcasm-rich period”. (An American In Paris Gagosian Gallery,
    Le Bourget, Paris 28 January - 3 May, 2014, www.lehmannmaupin.com).
    Executed in 1990, the present lot is a seminal example of the transitional

    period during the early nineties when he decided to leave New York and settle in Bali in 1997. This radical change of location paralleled a dramatic
    visual shift from considering the potential of ready-made objects and images in visual culture to interest in the natural environment and new
    ideas of culture and beauty. The incorporation of beds of coral and seaweed in Stratified Landscape #3 demonstrates his increasing interest in
    the natural environment, which has influenced his production for the past twenty years.

    Stratified Landscape #3 anticipates Bickerton’s interest in the natural environments further developed during his time in Bali, where he still lives,
    as well as retaining his early leitmotif of the deleterious effects of ferocious capitalism on landscapes, as the title of the work indicates.

27

Stratified Landscape #3

1990
wood, fiberglass, corroded steel, corroded copper, leather, rope, anodized aluminum, canvas, netting, beans, resin, decomposed seaweed, coral
254 x 121.9 x 78.7 cm (100 x 47 7/8 x 30 7/8 in.)

Estimate
£40,000 - 60,000 

Sold for £43,750

Contact Specialist
Peter Sumner
Head of Contemporary Art, London
psumner@phillips.com
+44 207 318 4063

Contemporary Evening Sale

London Auction 2 July 2014 7pm