Mike Kelley - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 17, 2007 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Metro Pictures, New York

  • Exhibited

    New York, Metro Pictures, Reversals, Recyclings, Completions, and Late Additions, November 2 - December 7, 2002

  • Catalogue Essay

    Mike Kelley’s work often continues themes brought to life during his childhood and upbringing in the mid-West. As a member of the Baby Boom generation, Kelley’s relationship with kitsch Americana was one that began from his earliest youth. For the Metro Pictures show in 2002 titled Reversals, Recyclings, Completions, and Late Additions, Kelley continued his confrontation with the “repressed memory syndrome’, which is to say how memory is uniquely affected by one’s personal history and ability to record and forget specific occurrences. These memories, in turn, precipitate art as they form, in the case of the artist’s mind especially, a unique set of visual cues and borders from which inspiration takes hold. In the present lot, Missing Time Color Exercise (Reversed) No. 1, Kelley’s obsessive mining of the past results in a detailed reconstruction of the soft-porn magazine covers, using recycled old issues (perhaps even from his own collection). That is to say, this work is an exercise he engages in to reveal the unpredictable and diverse nature of his own memory, within the logical order of their cased-in display, suggesting the ebb and flow of structured memory and how our adult brains prefer to construct past memories within a sense of order.

17

Missing Time Color Exercise (Reversed) No. 1

2002
Acrylic on wooden panels, magazines and Plexiglas in artist’s wooden frame.
44 1/2 x 110 3/4 in. (113 x 281.3 cm).

Estimate
$475,000 - 600,000 

Sold for $456,000

Contemporary Art Part I

17 May 2007
7pm New York