Mike Kelley. The Thirteen Seasons

 

 

The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #1: The Birth of the New Year, 1994
The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #2: Fecundity, 1994
The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #4: The Dawning of Sexuality, 1994
all: acrylic on wood panel, 62.5 x 40 in.

 

The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #3: What’s Limp in 3D is Erect in 2D, 1994acrylic on wood panel, 62.5 x 40 in.

Study for the Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on The Winter), 1994
collage on paper, 10.5 x 14 in.

 

The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #5: Summer’s Rage, 1994
The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #6: Fall, 1994
The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #7: The Descent, 1994
all: acrylic on wood panel, 62.5 x 40 in.

The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #10: The Decay of Year-End, 1994
acrylic on wood panel, 62.5 x 40 in.

Study for the Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter), 1994
collage on paper, 10.5 x 14 in.

The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #9: Snow on the Temples, 1994
The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #11: The Giving Old Man, 1994
The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #12: Death, 1994
all: acrylic on wood panel, 62.5 x 40 in.

all images: Courtesy of MIKE KELLEY, and  Jablonka Galerie, Cologne

– 

I decided to go back to my originating trauma- my student training- and I took all these drawings, which are perversions of Hoffmanesque compositional principles that I did in college, and I re-learned to paint that way. In trauma literature the part you can’t remember or the time of trauma is called ‘missing time,’ and then you recover it. So I re-learned to paint in this manner and did a series called the ‘Thirteen Seasons’ in this regressive manner. – by the late MIKE KELLEY

The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) is a series of paintings on wooden panels done in the mid-1990s which go back over MIKE KELLEY‘s youthful paintings. His student pieces created under the tuition of HANS HOFMANN (as both painter and teacher, HOFMANN had an enormous influence on the Abstract Expressionists and the following generation—the two generations that produced MIKE KELLEY‘s teachers at the University of Michigan) were reworked using the latter’s push-pull method of creativity allied to KELLEY‘s stated belief of his own childhood abuse – which he infers is similar to the painterly abuse he received from HOFMANN.

My own abuse was my training in HANS HOFMANN‘s push-pull theory. All the formal qualities in the organization of these works are patterned on that kind of formalist visual-art training which I see as a kind of visual indoctrination. These paintings are done in the manner of my student works. Hoffmanesque push-pull theory is also the base organizational principle of the buildings in ‘Educational Complex’ and even the sculptures that attend them. Everything else is a kind of social gloss added on top of that, taken from various cultural categories.

MOCA Grand Avenue in Los Angeles has mounted a just-opened exhibition, up through April 2, devoted to MIKE KELLEY whose recent death shaked the art world. Additionally, a major retrospective exhibition is being planned for the reopening of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, later this year, which will travel to the MOCA in 2014.



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