MIKE KELLEY
Naked Majas (Bettelheim’s Genital) (detail), 2008-2009
Acrylic on canvas, wood, enamel
70 1/2 x 192 x 4 1/2 inches (179.1 x 487.7 x 11.4 cm)
Mike Kelley at the Gagosian Gallery, 2009
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present Mike Kelley’s “Horizontal Tracking Shots,” his first show in New York devoted entirely to painting
November 7 – December 23, 2009
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Source: Gagosian Gallery – Evoking painting as a series of experiences akin to the movie camera gliding through space, capturing action as it goes, Kelley has devised a spatial push-pull effect through the arrangement of large polychrome panel paintings and smaller framed canvases. In the untitled colored reliefs, individual colors pop or recede in relation to each other. The colors of the flat support panels are determined by key colors in the organically shaped panels that are attached to them.
The colored reliefs, which evoke Modernist monochromes as well as domestic décor, have base moldings that give them an architectural quality, linking them to stage sets or theatrical space whereas the small framed paintings on canvas, hung individually or in tight clusters, operate like windows in the gallery walls, punctuating the spatial parameters set up by the larger panel paintings. In these smaller works with titles such as Mort’s Mouth (2008-2009) and Twin Henrys (2008-2009), Kelley draws freely from a wide range of sources including elementary school textbook illustration, New Age painting, comic strips, and science-fiction.
The free-standing construction Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms (2009), inspired by televisual space, presents a façade of colored panels on one side and on the other three video monitors that show TV color bars interspersed with short video clips depicting family life, from footage found on YouTube. Here color-field paintings become traumatic spaces. They are extensions of the ideas that Kelley explored in the Timeless Paintings (1995), where he employed the formalist relationships in Abstract Expressionist painting
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