Mike Kelley

“Timeless Painting”

Hauser & Wirth

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.

All images: © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved/ VAGA at ARS, NY Courtesy the Foundation and Hauser & Wirth Untitled 2, 2008 – 2009 Acrylic on wood panels 243.8 x 633.7 x 12.7 cm / 96 x 249 1/2 x 5 in Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

‘Mike Kelley. Timeless Painting’ contributes new perspectives to the discourse around the artist’s work, challenging conventional readings by exploring Kelley’s own meticulously documented intentions as a point Mike Kelley Timeless Painting Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street 12 November 2019 – 25 January 2020 Public Opening: Tuesday 12 November, 6 – 8 pm of departure; resituating these works within the larger formal context of his oeuvre; and expanding traditional definitions of painting. Toward these ends, the exhibition brings together a collection of diverse works connected by their relation to Kelley’s expansive Educational Complex project. These works he called, decisively, paintings. Owing to the highly conceptual and often unconventional interactions of form and subject matter, viewers might see sculpture, installation, or drawing where the artist saw only an opportunity to reconstitute his interest in the vernacular of American popular culture through the traditional medium of painting. In preparing the exhibition, Jenelle Porter looked to Kelley’s expansive and meticulously detailed document, Educational Complex Onwards (Project-related Flow Chart). Published in connection to a 2008 exhibition, this chart was created by the artist to articulate the interstitial relationships between forty different bodies of his work related to the titular project, Educational Complex, which aimed to reproduce from memory every educational institution the artist attended. Porter has employed the chart not only as a guide to Kelley’s thought processes and ideational framework for various bodies of work but also as a key to the particular terminology and identifications he attributed to each body of work.