American artist Ashley Bickerton came to the critical fore in the 1980s, winning acclaim with his complex fusions of Pop, Minimal and Conceptual Art. In 1993, Bickerton embarked on a series of paintings that displayed his formidable skills as a draftsman in paintings that savage the idea of the self, and the human condition in general. These images presented a cast of characters that included chemically-altered adults, glamorised babies and surgically-transformed apes.

For his exhibition at White Cube, Bickerton produced a suite of paintings that constituted an acerbic reworking of the four central images of Western art history: the patron, the crucifixion, the nude and the self-portrait. It is The Patron (1997), who receives the most brutal treatment: sat on his designer sofa, flanked by a Brancusi and a Mondrian, he gawps at the viewer, masturbating with one hand and clasping a remote control with the other; a wig lies discarded on the sofa. However, it is the crucifixion image that is the most savage, with its figure of Christ contorted in pain.

These confrontational paintings depict life-size figures in painstaking and refined detail. Bickerton used pencil, acrylic and oil paint on wood panels to produce these exquisite, meticulously hyper-real paintings, images that recall the graphic brilliance of 15th century northern-European painting. Through them, the artist presented a searing commentary on the potent endurance of the relationships between money, religion, sex and narcissism.