Ashley Bickerton Creates Colorful Seascapes with Debris Washed Ashore

Following recent surveys of his works at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in London and New York’s FLAG Art Foundation in 2017, Bickerton began his experimentation with the beach trash and has since developed a series of works that he calls Flotsam Paintings. Visually poetic, the paintings playfully feature bits of plastic, rubber, metal, and rope floating on a painted surface of canvas and cardboard. Arranged in an earth and sky binary that echoes the settings in which the artist discovered the discarded items, the paintings objectively comment on the realities of the world without being judgmental.

“It would be a mistake to assume these works are bemoaning the destruction of our home planet,” Bickerton told writer and cartoonist Anthony Haden-Guest in a recent Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art conversation. “I do not think of myself as an environmentalist, as being an environmentalist is to labor under the assumption that you are preserving the planet for human habitation. We as a species cannot destroy the planet, it is ever resilient and adaptive, and far bigger than us, but what we are certainly capable of is destroying its ability to support us as a species.”

Seeing beauty in the ocean-borne trash, Bickerton arranges it both randomly and strategically in colorful visual sentences and spirited groupings across his painted picture planes. Inspired by the surreal landscapes of Joan Miró and Milton Avery abstract seascapes, Bickerton composes hybrid paintings, displayed in handcrafted, crate-like frames, that speak to our times. The canvas Round Cloud mixes flattened flip-flops, plastic forks and combs, discarded cigarette lighters and synthetic drink bottles, and a toy soldier with other debris in a cloud-sky-water-beach terrain to form a dreamlike narrative.

The painting Padang Moon presents a stream of consciousness arrangement of toothbrushes, combs, nozzles, toys, seeds, caps, lighters, and slippers in an idyllic, moonlit sky above a tree-shrouded beach, while Dawn Estuary offers a stark, barely lit landscape with pale palm trees and cacti that’s populated by crushed bottles, doll heads, gelato spoons, ropes, hooks, balls, and plastic foot scrapers.

Three more paintings round out the show’s selection, which surrounds a suspended, life-size sculpture of a hammerhead shark. Cast in pink resin and clad in a fitted, yellow nylon suit with coconuts and water vials hanging below, it poses a threat, yet simultaneously seems like a high-tech gadget from a James Bond film. A longtime islander and avid surfer, Bickerton knows both the bounty and the dangers of the seas, and like Agent 007 he’s learned how to relish the treasure while avoiding the risks.

Two additional New York shows similarly scrutinize our ever-changing world from urban, rural, and heavenly points of view. The Boyle Family recreates sections of street corners and plowed fields in their presentation of wall works titled, “Nothing is more radical than the facts,” at Luhring Augustine and Jay Heikes painted outer space and sculpted unknown planets in his recent “Echo in Color” exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery.

Working together since 1957, Mark Boyle and Joan Hills were joined by their children, Sebastian and Georgia, to form the Boyle Family art collective in 1985. Best known for their Earth Studies, which reproduce detailed parcels of city and country sites as hyperrealist sculptural reliefs, the group randomly picks the spots for its works by throwing a dart at a map. Removing any subjectivity from the process of creation, the Boyles objectively aim to make their topographical wall works exactly the same as the plots of land that were marked on the map.

Study from the Westminster Series with Glass Pavement Light (1987) presents a detailed section of a litter-encrusted street in London. Defining a six-by-twelve-foot area of the street, the artists painstakingly cast every square inch of the spot and recreated it with resin and fiberglass. Like a 3D version of a photorealist painting, everything that the Boyles saw—ranging from crushed Pepsi cans to tire tracks in dirt—became part of the finished work. Similarly, Study of a Potato Field (1987) recreates a large section of tilled soil, complete with lumps of dirt, bits of hay, and scattered potatoes that didn’t make the harvest.

Two striking topographies come across as highly inventive monochromes. Concrete Pavement Study, Concrete Pavement Series (1976-77) captures the defined, man-made sections of a grimy, gray street or sidewalk, while Tidal Sand Study, Camber (2003-2005) sublimely freezes the natural, tidal movement of waves across a sandy beach. A cross between an archeological dig and an architectural reconstruction, the Boyle Family makes art that preserves the past, even as the sites that they have meticulously saved for posterity continue to evolve.

While the Boyles and Bickerton have their minds set on the land and seas, Heikes looks higher into the stratosphere for his subject matter. Fascinated with alchemy, he makes his Mother Sky paintings by staining the canvas with a combination of vinegar, salt, and powdered pigment. The mixture causes a chemical reaction that produces variable colors, which the artist overlays with dabbed-on and screenprinted clouds and smoke from found photographs. With such titles as Devil’s Triangle and Sargasso Sea, that reference supernatural sites on Earth, the canvases could be seen as portals to take our thoughts beyond everyday concerns.

His Minor Planets sculptures, which are crafted from a range of materials, including concrete, pyrite, salt, slag, asphalt, quartz, rope, and dust collected from the artist's studio, are magnificently assembled as odd orbs and disks. The metals in the materials—particularly from the pyrite and slag—will oxidize and mutate over time. Simulating matter that’s been floating through deep space for an eternity, Heikes’ planets offer viewers safe landing points in his captivating, celestial realm.