Southampton, NY – Tripoli Gallery is pleased to present its first solo exhibition by Ashley Bickerton, entitled Wall-Wall. On view from July 8 to August 8, 2016, Wall-Wall will open with a reception for the artist on Saturday, July 8 from 6 to 8 p.m. at 30a Jobs Lane in Southampton, NY.

Comprising new works that revisit the artist’s wall contemplation units of the 1980’s, the selection of works being presented were made in Bali Indonesia, where Bickerton has lived and worked since 1993.

These brightly colored new works, which the artist refers to as ‘painting things’, feature single and multi-panel wall facsimiles consisting of oil paint on fiberglass and resin cast rocks set on plywood structures with aluminum hanging armatures.

‘Wall-Wall’ represents a new incarnation of a series Bickerton began as a young artist in the mid 80s: "At the time I was obsessed with the idea of what a painting was, what a painting meant. Not as a picture, but as a thing, a thing in the world. One day in Mexico, just outside Acapulco after a long bus ride up from Oaxaca, I saw it, a hideous stone garden wall painted hot pink and purple (the rocks and mortar, respectively). It hit me in an instant: there it was, the answer I had been searching for. -If a painting is something that fills a space on a wall with color and meaning, then what is more obvious than a piece of colored wall to affect meaning?"

With this new Wall-Wall series, Bickerton now re-emerges from the islands of Indonesia with a novel approach and searing acid colors that stand in vivid contrast to the work originally forged so many years ago in the gritty greyness of downtown Manhattan.

“In a long and often breathless career, I feel I’ve pursued every reckless tangent with utterly no fidelity to any stylistic cohesion, but nevertheless in this tangle I knew inherently there was a larger overarching language that was distinctly my own. The project of the last several years has been to try to come full circle and in the process unearth that language, to give it shape and cadence, and understand how it has run through the work, clear and unadulterated from the beginning. The Wall-Walls turned out to be the key that unlocked it all'

(Additional works from this new series are also on view at Norton Gallery in Los Angeles from July 1st through September 10th).