Ashley Bickerton: Ornamental Hysteria

This poster featuring Tormented Self-Portrait: Susie at Arles (25 Years) (2014) was produced in 2017, in conjunction with Ashley Bickerton: Ornamental Hysteria at Newport Street Gallery, London. This major survey presented work made by Bickerton over a period of three decades, from his “consumerist” wall sculptures of the mid- to late 1980s to the vivid and idiosyncratic mixed-media paintings and sculptures of more recent years.

In Tormented Self-Portrait: Susie at Arles (25 Years) Bickerton revisits one of his earliest self-portrait constructions, a Minimalist-style box emblazoned with his obfuscatory trademark, “Susie,” alongside an array of corporate logos associated with products used by the artist. While inspired by Van Gogh’s self-portraits—hence the reference to Arles—Bickerton’s work replaces conventional representation of its subject with what he described as a “circumscribed liberty of obvious, eccentric, contradictory, and choiceless choices.”