Ashley Bickerton is associated with the 1980’s “Neo-Geo” artistic movement, which included artists such as Jeff Koons and Peter Halley. He moved to the Indonesian Island of Bali from New York in 1993, and his work has come to be influenced by his location. His early works were high-tech “commodity sculptures” where he used mostly corporate-logos, referring to the consumerism of the age. Working through photography, mixed media assemblages and painting, his practice has problematized traditional forms through exploring contemporary art with surreal grotesque figures and abstractions in order to question what represents “western” and “non- western”. He has experimented on the coexistence of the figurative and the abstract and he refers to his treatment as, ”biomorphic abstraction”. His figures mostly include floral, colorful thick globs of paint and exaggeratedly primitive, digitally manipulated expressions of women mounted on wood, fiberglass or clay. The autobiographical elements of his work are clearly visible in his over-exoticized figures and colours.
