Mike Kelley

Timeless Painting

12 November - 25 January 2020

New York, 22nd Street

Over the course of his four-decade career, Mike Kelley generated a remarkably diverse oeuvre in an array of media, conflating so-called high culture and low culture, critiquing prevailing aesthetic conventions, and combining traditional notions of the sacred and the profane. This exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, features paintings from different series created over a 15-year period, between 1994 and 2009, spotlighting the breadth of the artist’s engagement with the medium of painting.

Organized by guest curator Jenelle Porter, ‘Mike Kelley. Timeless Painting’ takes both its title and conceptual starting point from the series that gave rise to many of the works on view, and for which “the compositional approach,” Kelley stated, “is to be read as outside of the influence of historical aesthetic development.” Featuring examples from twelve bodies of work, including The Thirteen Seasons, Cult Paintings, and Missing Time Color Exercises, this exhibition highlights Kelley’s remarkable exploration of painting in color. The exhibition will present, for the first time in the United States, Kelley’s mixed media installation ‘Profondeurs Vertes’ (2006), the artist’s ode to paintings in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts that captivated him as a young person.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue produced by Hauser & Wirth Publishers in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. This book will include images of the complete series of works from which the exhibition draws, as well as texts by visual artists responding to Kelley’s work and an introduction by Jenelle Porter. Contributors include: Edgar Arceneaux with Kurt Forman, Carroll Dunham, Daniel Guzmán, Richard Hawkins, Jay Heikes, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Mary Reid Kelley, Laurie Simmons, and Christina Quarles.

Selected images

Yummy Puffy Mommy Yoni

2008

Black Velvet Study #3

2002

Carpet #2

2003

Wood Grain #5

2003

Untitled 2

2008

Lobed

2008-2009

Installation views

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About the Artist

Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley is widely considered one of the most influential artists of our time. Originally from a suburb outside of Detroit, Kelley attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before moving to Southern California in 1976 to study at California Institute of the Arts from which he received an MFA in 1978. The city of Los Angeles became his adopted home and the site of his prolific art practice. In much of his work, Kelley drew from a wide spectrum of high and low culture, and was known to scour flea markets for America’s cast-offs and leftovers. Mining the banal objects of everyday life, Kelley elevated these materials to question and dismantle Western conceptions of contemporary art and culture.

Starting out in the late 1970s, Kelley became known for performance and installation based works; he came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of common craft materials and stuffed animals. His work later widened in scope and physical scale, exemplified by ‘Educational Complex’ (1995), the ‘Kandors’ series (1999 – 2011), ‘Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction’ series (2000 – 2011), and the posthumously completed public work ‘Mobile Homestead’ (2006 – 2013). These projects invoked a vast range of media and forms, illustrating the artist's versatility and underscored a number of Kelley's recurrent themes, such as repressed memory, sexuality, adolescence, class, and Americana, which were central to his artistic praxis. Throughout his career, Kelley also worked on curatorial projects, collaborated with many artists and musicians, and produced a formidable body of critical and creative writing.