“This ocean borne detritus, or flotsam, was laid out in the vestigial formations of the waves that washed them onto the shore as the tide receded. It said everything I wanted to say and I knew I could run with it. The question then became, run where?” — Ashley Bickerton

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce In Focus: Ashley Bickerton, a special presentation by the Bali-based artist featuring a series of new paintings, collectively titled Flotsam Series. This will be the artist’s first presentation with Lehmann Maupin in New York since 2013; his last exhibition in New York City was with the FLAG Art Foundation in 2017. Bickerton is best known for his paintings and sculptures that insistently raise questions about the art object and many aspects of art production, from its cultural fetishization, to industrial fabrication, to stylistic branding, to art marketing and sales―particularly as these relate to the revered tradition of painting. The artist has spent much of his career experimenting with the hybridization of forms, materials, and methods. Often merging media, genre, and subject, Bickerton challenges the parameters of art making, calling into question the value, signification, and function of the art object itself. Since the 1980s, each of Bickerton’s series, though seemingly disparate, have been aligned in their often-critical evaluation of culture. For his most recent body of work the artist engages traditional landscape painting in order to examine the reality of today’s cultural and ecological landscape, both of which have been shaped irrevocably by human desire, consumption, and industrial waste.