Created in the mid-1990s, Kelley’s shaped paintings marked the artist ’s return to the medium after a prolonged spell of focusing on performance and installation art. They also coincided with his magnum opus of the period: A sprawling tabletop sculpture titled Educational Complex. An agglomeration of architectural models representing each of the schools Kelley had attended, the piece explored the social and psychological constraints imposed by formal training, especially in the field of art. Indeed, as a student, Kelley had to reckon with the reality of radical styles like Abstract Expressionism being imposed as academic canon. As he himself put it, “My education must have been a form of mental abuse, of brainwashing.” The work here delves into some of the same issues, particularly in a series of ovals in which Kelley deconstructs various modernist tropes—such as Hans Hofmann’s “push and pull” theory of color—by filtering them through images culled for childhood memory.
Mike Kelley, “Shaped Paintings”
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