Mike Kelley - Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York Thursday, March 4, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Collection of Joyce Eliason; Metro Pictures, New York

  • Exhibited


    Chicago, The Renaissance Society, Mike Kelley: Three Projects: Half a Man, From My Institution to Yours, and Pay for Your Pleasure, May 4 - June 30, 1988; New York, Nyehaus, California Maximalism, November 6 - January 9, 2010

  • Literature


    E. Sussman, Catholic Tastes, New York, 1993, p. 248

  • Catalogue Essay


    Daddy embodies established convention and personal evolvement—felt banners from the handicraft movement used to document genealogy and miscellaneous religiosity, which slowly evolved into a method of recording school sportsmanship and education. As such, Daddy is a  conglomeration of traditional symbology, reductive shapes, and childhood color palettes and aesthetic. While Kelley is known for his infantile regression and preoccupation with morbid Freudian references, Daddy is comparatively sentimental with only slight Oedipus complex.
    The felt banners are reminiscent of the type found in church meeting halls and school classrooms. Derived from modernist sources such as Henri Matisse’s cutouts and Alexander Calder’s prints, their outward form elicits a joyous primitivism, a stylized adult misrepresentation of children’s art. Because they are used to preach to children, or to the child in us, we infer the rules of authority and the family—the patriarchy—hidden under the love exteriors of the banners.
    Mike Kelley quoted in Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals, Cambridge, 2004, p. 14

28

Daddy

1987

Felt collage.

92 1/2 x 67 in. (235 x 170.2 cm).

Estimate
$60,000 - 80,000 

Sold for $56,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

4 Mar 2010
New York