Mike Kelley

Jablonka Galerie, Cologne
Acquired directly from the above by Wim Beeren for the Peter Stuyvesant Collection in 1995

Washington, Hirshhorn Museum, Distemper, Dissonant Themes in the Art of the 1990s, 1996
Barcelona, Museum d'Art Contemporani di Barcelona; Malmö, Rooseum, Center for Contemporary Art; Eindhoven, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Mike Kelley 1985-1996, 1997, p. 92, illustrated in colour
Amsterdam, BAT offices (& travelling), Growth in the Peter Stuyvesant Collection, 1997, no. 14, illustrated in colour
Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Painting at the Edge of the World, 2001

John C. Welchmanm, Mike Kelley, New York 1999, p. 38, illustrated in colour

Colours: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is softer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are several white specks of media accretion scattered throughout, most notably along the lower section of the left edge (faintly visible in the catalogue illustration). There are some very small rub marks: three to the bottom of the composition and a further to the upper section of the right edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Mike Kelley's, The Descent, is the 7^th painting in a series of paintings entitled The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) from 1994.  These oval shaped paintings, executed on wood, were meant to resemble Kelley's student work and are essential to his explorations and inquiry into themes of memory and time that have permeated his career.  Kelley completed his undergraduate work at the art school at the University of Michigan, primarily a painting school at the time. His interests went far beyond solely oil on canvas – he was deeply interested in experimentation with multi-media, performance, music, and conceptual art, and political commentary.  He was creatively at odds with artistic genres, especially those that dealt with academic and stylized organization.  Despite his immersion in hippie street culture in Detroit, Kelley moved to Los Angeles in 1976, where he received a Masters in Fine Arts from the California Institute for the Arts.  After a prolific 15 year period of sculpture, performance and conceptual art, Kelley returned to his original training and to painting.

The present work, as well as the other 12 oval paintings from this series, portrays childhood memories that have been distorted.  In The Descent the viewer is confronted by three floating eerily smiling jack-o-lanterns and scattered Christmas ornaments and candy canes.  The objects chaotically orbit each other on the orange background as drips and washy brush strokes blur and cover them.  The works from The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) were displayed at Jablonka Galerie in Cologne in 1995 and this exhibition was accompanied by an essay by Timothy Martin in which he states that The Thirteen Season, "the oval shape of the paintings bends the picture plane into the configuration of a cameo, privileging the temporal over the spatial, and haunting the painting's timelessness with the cameo's evocations of time lost." (John C. Welchman, ed., Mike Kelley, Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals, Cambridge, 2004, p. 74)

Kelley described his return to painting in terms of a form of psychoanalysis – perhaps a sarcastic commentary on therapists' desire to explore a person's past as a method for understanding their present through bringing forward old memories that have been repressed.  Critics often theorized that perhaps Kelley himself had a disturbed past.  To investigate the veracity of this theory he went back to painting in an attempt to consciously re-enter his origins as an artist – at times even going so far as to paint over his early work, simultaneously erasing and creating.  Kelley states of his painting, "When painting a painting, there comes the final period when you enter into struggle with it.  It taunts you; it dares you to force it to behave, to make it be "right"...It calls out: "I have yet to conform.  That mysterious sense of order and balance has not yet been attained." But when this balance is found you instinctively know it.  Then the painting becomes placid and ceases to cry out.  Only then is it good." (Mike Kelly, "Goin' Home, Goin' Home" in John C. Welchman, ed., Mike Kelley, Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals, Cambridge, 2004, p. 76) The title of the series The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) is dark and disturbing.  Clearly by choosing the inauspicious number 13, Kelley is setting up the viewer to be unsettled, and focusing on the darkest season winter continues the disconcertion further.