Mike Kelley - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles

  • Catalogue Essay

    A repo-man for the postmodern art world, Kelley defamed the airwaves with his drainpipe musicology, debunked abstraction with mordant anti-spiritualism, renovated the genre of performance-cum-theater-plusinstallation, and stubbornly resisted the stylistic lures and generic lines which eventually seduced or overwhelmed his generation. All this while he was growing up. J.C.Welchman, “The Mike Kelleys,” Mike Kelley, London, 1999 Mike Kelley’s Textural Index (Landscape Contra Figure) from 1990 is a veritable tour de force from the artist’s long tenured career as America’s famed Conceptualist.The major symbols from his past combine in the present lot to form a comprehensive index of all his previous (to this point) styles and techniques.The lot is a testament to the long-standing creative impulses within the artist’s background, and references, in aesthetic approach, the famous Garbage drawings, doll paintings, and plywood sculptures that recently precede this work. Evoking in both spirit and form the literal substance and symbols from even his earliest methodologies as art student, Textural Index (Landscape Contra Figure) provides us with a visual lexicon of exactly what it takes to be a Mike Kelley work of art, supremely entertaining and persuasive in its rawest form.

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Textural Index (Landscape Contra Figure)

1990
Acrylic on wooden panel (in three parts) with wooden struts.
51 5/8 x 144 in. (131.1 x 365.8 cm) overall.

Estimate
$600,000 - 800,000 

Sold for $657,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York