Good Art #19. Missing Time Color Exercise.

A whopping Mike Kelley retrospective is currently showing at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It's an astounding showcase of a wide variety of works from Kelley's career spanning painting, drawing, prints, sculpture, installation and more. Missing Time Colour Exercise (Reversed) No. 2 from 2002 is a work I've not seen before, but one that kept me staring at the walls and so a perfect Good Art.

Mike Kelly's collection of Sex To Sexty magazine is the focus of this work. His covers are displayed chronologically with painted panels representing missing issues — the covers themselves featuring bawdy depictions of hillybilly-like characters in amusing poses and situations. While it's easy to be distracted by the sexually charged puns and drop-jaw humour, the work is more complex and said to be a parody of colour assignments common in art schools. There's also a nod to colour field painting and the use of the archive as a rich source of inspiration for artists. I loved this work. It's clever, funny and cheeky. Incidently, Kelly edited a book of the Sex to Sexty published by Taschen.