Mike Kelley: Timeless Painting

The first thorough look at Mike Kelley’s riotous, irreverent and colorful paintings

Featuring paintings from series that span a 15-year period, 1994 through 2009, this volume traces Mike Kelley’s (1954-2012) engagement with the medium through bodies of work including The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter), a series of oval-shaped paintings on wood; Timeless Painting, which marked Kelley’s distinct return to painting in color, and which he described as mannerist take-offs on Hans Hofmann’s compositional theory of ‘push and pull’ ; the Horizontal Tracking Shots series; as well as works made under the umbrella of his expansive and ambitious Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions, a series related to the Educational Complex artwork.

Kelley’s seminal mixed-media installation Profondeurs Vertes, his ode to the influential paintings in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts that captivated him as a young person, is also featured.

The publication includes texts by various contemporary visual artists responding to Kelley’s art: Edgar Arceneaux, Carroll Dunham, Daniel Guzman, Richard Hawkins, Jay Heikes, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Mary Reid Kelley, Christina Quarles and Laurie Simmons.