“The first myth you have to dispel is that I live in some kind of a Gauginesque paradisiacal fantasy,” Ashley Bickerton tells me over Zoom from his home in Bali. Though he has called the island home since the early nineties, COVID-19 has brought out some deep-seated contradictions. “In the expat community and the surf world here,” he says, “it’s maddening because there is definitely a racial line with masks. The white foreigners believe that COVID-19 protocol is only for the brown serving classes. I don’t know if it’s because of my Indonesian family or growing up as I did, but I find it intolerable. I boil when I see the imperious entitlement of this neocolonial indolent class.” A suite of new paintings currently on view at Lehmann Maupin likewise reflect this desire to puncture idyllic illusions. Called the “Flotsam” series, they consist of seascapes and landscapes covered in detritus that washed up on the shores in Bali: flip flops, lighters, plastic water bottles and the like.

The show came about as a result of the cancelations and problems created by the pandemic. Bickerton originally had a double show scheduled for Lehmann Maupin and Various Small Fires in Los Angeles for February last year. “It was going to be my umpteenth comeback,” he explains, “and COVID threw a wrench in that.” The work itself, however, grew out of an earlier series of sculptures, the “Vectors,” which likewise incorporated beach detritus, first exhibited at the Newport Street Gallery in London (“Damien Hirst’s private museum,” he wryly comments) in the exhibition Ornamental Hysteria in 2017. The show presented a chronological survey of Bickerton’s career with a final room for new work. Hirst told him, Bickerton recalls, “This has to be the best thing you’ve ever done.” So, “I had to make the best work I’ve ever made on call, which everyone knows is impossible, but it was tempting and it was a challenge.” He found it down at the beach one evening in the patterns of detritus and the lines of the receding tide.

“It fit so much into the vocabulary that I’ve established over the years,” he recalls. “The organic carrying all these cyphers, all these signals, these residues of lives lived, of human narratives, discarded relics of childhood. Particularly poignant for me are the one-use things, like those plastic clips that go into your clothing when you buy them, and you pull them out and throw them away immediately, and that’s all they’re ever made for. And they’re issued out of the anthroposphere into the biosphere for eternity. There is a dark poetry there that I found somewhat exquisite.”

Even as he created subsequent versions of the “Vector” boxes, they seemed to call out for chromatic elements, and he decided to return to the original eureka through paint. “When I saw the wave lines on the beach,” he says, “I knew it was a path to follow, but what path? There are so many ways to approach it.” The first one he did was on raw canvas, but he wasn’t satisfied because the canvas is the color of sand, so “it looked like a model of the real thing.” He wanted something “more poetic, more discursive, even more mystical.” Then he tried abstract backgrounds of morphing color, but that didn’t work either. “It’s hard,” he tells me, “to make the objects and paint mate properly.” He made his way through every imaginable kind of paint and application. “I knew I had something,” he says, “I knew I had to nail it. I worked through so many variations.”

There was also in the question of presentation. At first, he put them behind glass. He had, he says, a somewhat cynical reason: “Your job is to find garbage and put it in collectors’ homes and they’re going to pay you good money for it. So, by putting them behind glass, they become a museum specimen. It’s a distancing device.” But he decided to ditch the glass, and instead “pick my objects carefully, have fewer objects and key up the backgrounds to bring them in to play more.” This then led to a building up of the backgrounds by incorporating cardboard, discarded clothing, thickening paints. “It’s like pushing paint through cracks and rough terrain,” he says. One element that stuck early on: “the earth sky binary—blue sky and brown earth.” For this effect, his inspiration was Dali, Miro and Tanguy. But he also came to draw heavily on the visionary American modern landscapes from Milton Avery, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Marsden Hartley: “Not a depiction of an actual place, not a mirror of the world around. It is a psychic trigger for experience.”

In fact, he says, he “stole liberally from those guys,” likening it to a musician playing a cover. “I’m not a libertarian by any means,” he explains, “but I think I am in art. I hate to say that because after the debacle of the Trump presidency and the hell we’ve been through with COVID, libertarianism has a stink about it and I’m somewhat repulsed to use the word. But I might share some if their philosophies when it comes to artmaking.”

The final element of the Flotsam paintings is that they are framed in shipping crates. “It’s a little bit arch-,” he says, “because they don’t actually work as shipping crates.” In fact, the show was delayed several times because of problems with shipping. Bickerton was pretty sanguine about it though: “What am I gonna say? That we should deny vital medical equipment and vaccines during a pandemic so we can transport baubles for the plutocracy.”

Complicating the entire process of organizing the show is that Bickerton has been dealing with pressing health problems. He is suffering from spinal stenosis, a deterioration of the nerves in the lower back. He now walks with a cane and finds it increasingly difficult to go up and down steps—and he lives on top of a steep hill. Although he’s tried every therapy he can, “there is very little you can do during COVID on the island of Bali,” he explains.

The illness came on slowly: “I noticed I couldn’t twerk in my forties. I couldn’t do my impressions of Madonna rolling around on the ground. I could still surf, I could still do everything else. I just thought it was aging.” But then, during several months in Los Angeles at the start of the pandemic, he noticed physical activity starting to get harder. “I could still push a pram up the hill to Griffith Observatory, so I thought I’m okay. Now I realize pushing a pram up a hill like that at 60 probably isn’t great for your lower spine, even if people look at you say, ‘that guy’s tough, pushing his granddaughter up the hill.’ When in actual fact I’m pushing my daughter and I’m not tough, I’m broken now.”

Back in Bali in July, the real shock came when he was out surfing and couldn’t stand up on the board. “For anybody who’s surfed their whole life,” he explains, “you don’t think about it. It just comes naturally, it’s like breathing.” Friends paddled over and looked at him with “a mixture of surprise, pity and abject horror.”

“If I never surf again,” he says, “I’m okay, even though I have spent my life doing it and it’s one of my great loves. I’m fed up with surfers; they’re bunch of fucking idiots, and I don’t say that lightly after this pandemic.” More challenging is that between all the therapies, he only gets to the studio for a couple hours a day.

He seems optimistic, however, and is eager to move on to new projects. When I ask whether the detritus was all really found on the beach in Bali or whether it was more like the shipping crates that aren’t really shipping crates, he assures that it all—well, almost all of it—was. There was a bit of “the hand of God intervening.”

“Very early on,” he recounts, “I realized there was fundamental bifurcation in thinking in art, exemplified by two friends of mine. On one hand, you had Jeff Koons who took the basketball, and it actually had to float. It has to be what it is. And on the other side, you’ve got the likes of Damien Hirst. He’d split a cow in half and stitch it onto clear plexiglas with nylon filament, suspended in certain ways—so it was about the theater of what you’re seeing. I realized that I’m very clearly on the second side. I don’t really care if it is what it is.

“I’m telling a story,” he says. “It’s art. It’s not a science project. If art hues too closely to empirical reasoning, it can be dull. Sometimes it has to take flights of fancy. It breaches a mystical divide, it opens up a portal to something possible.”

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A few wings may flutter and a few harps may sing when artist Robert Nava opens his show of new paintings at Vito Schnabel Gallery later this month. Under the title “Angels,” this body of work explores the inexhaustible variations of those celestial beings, giving form and fanciful specializations—Night Storm Angel, Gold Sky and Wind Angel, Asteroid Maker Angel (all 2020)—to a religious symbol oft-explored in the history of art.

Nava has a longstanding interest in fantastical and mythical subject matter—witches, monsters, beasts and knights—so this latest chapter is not entirely a surprise. “I think I’m attracted to the mystery [of this material],” he tells me. “Sometimes I find it comforting that I don’t know the answer, that I don’t understand what everything on this Egyptian tomb means. But from the look of it I can see the integrity of care.” In addition to this combination of “mystique and seriousness,” he says, “some of it—and this is just me getting into my kid side—is just badass.”

Getting into his kid side is, in fact, a central piece of Nava’s approach: “As a kid I was just attracted to this stuff—imagination and fantasy—and I try to keep it alive as an adult.” His style likewise seeks to capture a kind of naïve intuitiveness. In a rapid primitivist scrawl, his figures look like they could have been torn from the pages of a child’s drawing pad or the margins of a daydreaming high school student’s notebook. “A scribble can have the same seriousness or weight as any other kind of mark making,” he offers, and then cites Cy Twombly, who said, “My line is childlike but not childish.” Although it can be fun to make works like these—”not all the time,” he assures me—”they’re handled with care.” Put otherwise: “I want to be a really, really good scribbler.”

Nava speaks about the creatures that populate his canvases at times as if he weren’t necessarily in control of them. Of the origins of the angel paintings, he tells me, “I had a studio that was filled with all these monster paintings that I was working on. And the first angel happened a little by mistake and a little bit as some kind of hero to stand up to those.” That initial hero was soon joined by others: “I got into a rhythm where maybe every four or five paintings it was time for another angel,” he says, before they finally took over the studio’s subject matter. Though the first were seemingly champions, the line between good and evil is not always so clear. “The angels taught me that they’re not all good,” Nava says, turning his preliminary childlike reading of the work on its head. “And then you start thinking, ‘are some of the monsters good?’”

Art history, of course, is not short on angels. To my mind Nava’s evoke—among other sources—Byzantine icons and, perhaps most of all, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), which critic Walter Benjamin famously deemed the “angel of history,” blown backwards into the future by the endless piling-up of catastrophe upon catastrophe. Although Nava is wary of projecting the agonistic battle of his studio walls onto the world spirit, he says, “maybe it is time for something like that.”

At loose ends after months in and out of lockdown, scrolling through countless OVRs (online viewing rooms), Will Leung found himself doing something he never would have expected: opening a gallery. He’d been collecting for about a decade, with a particular taste for emerging artists and a life built around the sequence of fairs. “I was traveling to every major fair,” he recounts. “After Frieze [in February 2020], I hung out in LA for a couple weeks, came back [to New York] and went to Armory and Independent, and then everything shut down. And by June, it was clear this was not ending any time soon.”

So, when his friend Ellie Rines, owner of 56 Henry gallery, told him there was a space available next door, he went for it and spent the summer scrambling to get things ready. In September he inaugurated ATM Gallery with a show of works on paper by Huma Bhabha, Robert Nava and Eddie Martinez. Since then ATM has been on an accelerated exhibition schedule, forgoing the standard six-week show for four. Exhibitions are often separated by less than week, in which to de-install, paint, patch and hang. It’s not unheard of for a show to come down on a Sunday, and a new one to go up on Wednesday.

ATM is not a one-man operation, however. In fact, Leung’s partner, Bill Brady, has some experience with running a gallery—and doing so in a crisis. He had to postpone the opening of a space on Avenue B by a month, the original kickoff date having been set for September 14, 2001. It, too, had been called ATM Gallery, because Brady had installed an ATM out front to help cover the cost of rent. “We decided to bring it back,” Leung explains, characterizing their why not thinking thusly: “Hey, we’re in a pandemic, let’s do it.” Brady showed him the ropes (“he taught me how to hang a show”) but day-to-day operations fall to Leung, since his partner lives in Miami (where he has another gallery, which bears his name) and, unwilling to fly, drives back-and-forth with each show.

“I never wanted to be a gallerist,” Leung says. “I never wanted to represent artists. I wanted to help artists.” Even while Leung became something like unwitting gallerist, ATM does not have a roster and instead functioning like a “launching pad for emerging artists,” who generally don’t have representation. Sometimes he finds them on social media. “And then one young artist might show their friend’s work,” and on it goes. He encountered the work of Korean painter Sun Woo when a friend sent him an image. He reached out to Woo, she sent a work for a group show that opened in December and later this year she’ll be having a solo show at the gallery. With a program founded on a principle of giving space to artists who have never before had a solo show in New York, the gallery is booked through the end of the year.

Even if he isn’t representing them, Leung wants to be there for these young artists. He tells them they can him any time. “I’ve seen enough as a collector and I’ve seen how other galleries treat artists. You have to be transparent about the business side,” he says. “But social media also messes with expectations, and prices can go up way to fast.” His main piece of advice: “Commit to your vision.”

On the other side of the equation, he’s very wary of speculators. “Just buy gold,” he tells collectors when they say their interested in a piece of art as an investment. “I have to do right by the artist first.” Still, he’s motivated to sell, if only because the space is tiny and they don’t have storage. “I’m trying,” he says. “I don’t know if I’m doing it right. I don’t know if I’m making money. I’m chasing people to pay me, just so I can ship it. I don’t have space to store anything.”

Even as he throws himself into this new venture with abandon, some uncertainties do weigh on Leung’s mind: “What am I gonna do when traveling starts again?”