Ashley Bickerton

To get to Ashley Bickerton’s home in Bali, you take the congested main road to the southern peninsula of Butik, past the beach area known as Dreamland and on to the massive Pecatu Indah resort, whose entrance is marked by a towering sculpture of Vishnu riding atop the eagle Garuda. You then veer sharp left in front of a steady onslaught of motorcycles overloaded with people and materials and head down the hill toward a comparatively lush, quiet part of the island.

Somehow, I miss Bickerton’s compound the first time I drive down the narrow winding road that cuts through chicken farms and secluded villas. On the way back up, the entrance appears so distinct that it could only be Bickerton’s. The thatched-roof gatehouse, with a big number 13 carved from wood on the front, is supported by a pair of tumescent green pillars. Burrowed inside each of these is a bald, yellow-headed, blue-tongued serpent figure—a signature motif cast from the artist’s own head and frequently seen in his garish, satirical paintings from the mid-2000s recording a foreigner’s lecherous life in Bali. 

Bickerton’s residence is much more of a wonderland than any tourist resort on the island, yet its idiosyncratic style also makes it the anti-villa villa. Set into a steep hillside with sweeping views of the ocean are several Balinese-styled buildings, their features exaggerated like the architecture in Dr. Seuss tales. One, made of black river stones with a terra-cotta-tiled roof, contains his studio and fabrication facilities; another is a long, open-aired space with a sloping roof used for entertaining and dining, and is filled with serpentine-branched furniture, old Balinese masks, turtle shells and his own recent paintings—including one of a red motorbike driven by a blue-faced man and overladen with kitschy objects and four rainbow-color-painted Balinese women. Adjacent is a two-story water tower embedded with ornamental ceramic plates. Near the swimming pool, there’s a kitchen and dining area fashioned from an old Javanese house—constructed from once-colorful painted and carved wood, now faded—that he brought back to Bali and rebuilt with a new roof and foundation. The place is, in a word, exuberant.

Wearing a black T-shirt, little gray cap and long cargo shorts that reveal Pacific-style tattoos, Bickerton declares in his hard-to-place, non-English, but British-ish accent, “Well, I’m Hindu now, I guess.” He was married just the day before—a big congratulations sign, in the local style, fringed by already wilting flowers, rests by the pool. We sit down on the veranda of the old Javanese building as his teenage son walks by with a surfboard under each arm, getting ready, he says, for three o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, when he and his father predict the best swells, kicked up by Antarctic storms, will make landfall on the island’s shores. “We’re planning the whole week around it,” Bickerton says. He then launches into several stories at once. One is on the woes of fabrication in Yogyakarta, and the other about how he has just found out, via Facebook, that he is currently having a solo show in Zurich, which had opened the week prior and, unbeknownst to him, had quoted him in the press release, despite the show being entirely composed of secondary-market work. 

Before concluding any of these tales, he digresses into a discussion of Jeff Koons’ latest exhibition at David Zwirner gallery in New York, the profile in New York magazine in early May that named Koons the “Most Successful American Artist Since Warhol,” and the bitching and rejoinders that old New York friends and colleagues had posted online. There we are, a world away from the art scene where Bickerton made his name in the mid-1980s with his contemporaries at Sonnabend Gallery, as part of the Neo-Geo crowd that included Peter Halley, Meyer Vaisman and Koons. Yet Bickerton is as up-to-date on the vicissitudes and triumphs of the old gang as when he left New York in 1993 to settle on the shores of the Indian Ocean.