November 12 - January 25, 2020
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.
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We are pleased to invite you to the opening reception of an exhibition organized in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, which focuses on Kelley’s singular approach to painting as a conceptual medium. Over the course of his influential four-decade career, Mike Kelley generated a remarkably diverse oeuvre in an array of media, conflating high and low culture, critiquing prevailing aesthetic conventions, and colliding the sacred with the profane. Featuring paintings from series that span a 15 year period, 1994 through 2009, the exhibition traces Kelley’s 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 Paintings, which signified Kelley’s distinct return to painting in color; as well as works made under the umbrella of his expansive and ambitious Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions series related to the artwork, ‘Educational Complex.’ 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, will also be featured, marking its US debut.
Please join us and artist Jay Heikes for a tour of ‘Mike Kelley. Timeless Painting’ on view at Hauser & Wirth New York 22nd Street through 25 January. We will meet in the Hauser & Wirth Publishers Bookshop. Jay Heikes (b. 1975; lives and works in Minneapolis) makes sculptures, paintings, installations—typically combining materials with almost alchemical operations—that activate stories, puns, and irony as forms of meditation. Heikes has had solo museum exhibitions at the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center, New York; among others. Recent gallery exhibitions include Boesky East and Marianne Boesky, New York; Federica Shiavo Gallery, Milan; Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam; and Reserve Ames, Los Angeles. His work is in the permanent collections of the BAMPFA, Berkeley, CA; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
On the occasion of the exhibition ‘Mike Kelley. Timeless Painting’, please join us in the Hauser & Wirth Publisher Bookshop for a conversation moderated by Randy Kennedy, with Jamian Juliano-Villani and John Miller. The panel will discuss the life, artwork, and process of Mike Kelley also highlighting the recently published ‘Mike Kelley: Timeless Painting’. Randy Kennedy is Director of Special Projects at Hauser & Wirth and editor of 'Ursula' magazine. Previously, Randy was a staff writer at The New York Times, where he worked for 23 years, more than half of that time writing about the art world. He is the author of the novel ‘Presidio,’ published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster, and a collection of essays, ‘Subwayland: Adventures in the World Beneath New York,’ published in 2004 by St. Martins Press. Jamian Juliano-Villani (b. 1987; lives and works in Brooklyn) is the daughter of commercial printers, and grew up around her parents’ New Jersey business where she was exposed to a wide range of graphic design. This can be seen in her paintings, which blend visual references from popular culture and art historical sources. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Massimo De Carlo, Milan; JTT, New York; Studio Voltaire, London; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit. Her work has been included in recent international group exhibitions at Kunstal Rotterdam; MAXXI, Rome; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Brooklyn Museum; and the Serpentine Gallery, London. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. John Miller is an artist, writer and musician based in New York and Berlin. His previous books include Mike Kelley: Educational Complex published by Afterall Books, in addition to The Ruin of Exchange: Selected Writings and The Price Club: Selected Writings (1977-1998), both published by JRP-Ringier and the Consortium as part of their Positions series. La Magasin in Grenoble, the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Kunsthalle Zurich, and the ICA Miami have held solo exhibitions of his artwork. Miller’s work was recently featured in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo and in a solo exhibition at the Museum im Bellpark in Kriens, Switzerland. Miller is a Professor of Professional Practice in Barnard College’s Art History Department.
On the occasion of 'Mike Kelley. Timeless Painting', we are honored to host artists Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether who will perform a musical response to complement the exhibition that runs through 25 January 2020 at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street. The event is standing room only and space is limited. Kim Gordon studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and has continued to work as an artist since. Her first solo exhibition presented under the name ‘Design Office’ took place at New York’s White Columns in 1981. For the past thirty years Gordon has worked consistently across disciplines and across distinct cultural fields: art, design, writing, fashion (X-Girl), music (Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, Body/Head), and film/video (both as actress and director). Gordon’s artworks include the ongoing ‘Noise Painting’ series, depicting the names of experimental and noise groups; a series of paintings depicting the names of contemporary galleries and gallery owners; works from the untitled ‘From The Boyfriend’ series – Rorschach-like images painted on used denim skirts; ‘Twitter Paintings’ sourced from the Twitter streams of ‘GIRLS’ producer Jenni Konner, critic Jerry Saltz, and artist Richard Prince among others; and her ‘Wreath Paintings’, which employ the decorative folk forms as stencils to produce vertiginous color abstractions. An insistence on dismantling the hierarchical sanctity of the object has become a through line in Gordon’s practice, and in her most recent work, canvases are treated with direct application of paints, resins, glitters and fiberglass, as well as physical manipulation. Performing a painting becomes its own medium, as finished works are crumpled, overturned and flung. Fixed between states of de- and re-composition, battle scars from past performances become gestural abstraction via mischievous punk irreverence. **Jutta Koether'**s practice intertwines painting with the genres of music, performance, and writing, developing an alternate genealogy and practice of the medium. She started her artistic career in her home town of Cologne in the 1980s, where she was editor of the influential pop culture magazine Spex. In the early 1990s she moved to New York where her work included collaborations among others with Tom Verlaine, Steven Parrino, John Miller, Tony Conrad, and Kim Gordon. She lives and works in Berlin and New York. Koether's work has been subject to an extensive survey at Museum Brandhorst in Munich and Mudam Luxembourg in 2018 and 2019, on the occasion of which a comprehensive catalogue featuring essays by Manuela Ammer, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Julia Gelshorn, Achim Hochdörfer, Branden W. Joseph, Tonio Kröner, Michael Sanchez, and Anne M. Wagner was published. Further exhibitions of her work were held at Dundee Contemporary Arts (2013), the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2011), the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (2009), and Kunsthalle Bern (2009). Her works are in the collections of major international museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Berlin's Nationalgalerie, Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna, Museum Ludwig Cologne, and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Current solo exhibitions are on display at Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach (through February 16, 2020), at Galerie Buchholz Berlin (through January 25, 2020), and upcoming at Lévy Gorvy New York (opening February 2020). Since 2010 Koether has been professor of painting and drawing at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. This position is in continuation of various educational engagements since the early 1990s including appointments at Columbia University, Cooper Union School of Art, and School of Visual Arts in New York, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, Yale University in New Haven, Universität der Künste in Berlin and Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi in Copenhagen.
Mike Kelley is widely considered one of the most influential artists of our time. Originally from a suburb outside of Detroit, Kelley attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before moving to Southern California in 1976 to study at California Institute of the Arts from which he received an MFA in 1978. The city of Los Angeles became his adopted home and the site of his prolific art practice. In much of his work, Kelley drew from a wide spectrum of high and low culture, and was known to scour flea markets for America’s cast-offs and leftovers. Mining the banal objects of everyday life, Kelley elevated these materials to question and dismantle Western conceptions of contemporary art and culture.
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