The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #10: The Decay of Year-End

After a prolific 15 year period of performance, multi-media and conceptual art, Kelley returned to his original training and to painting in 1994 - The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #10: The Decay of Year-End belongs to one of his most celebrated series of paintings. The present lot, an oval-shaped painting executed on wood harks back to Kelley's work from his student days: 'I decided to go back to my originating trauma- my student training- and I took all these drawings, which are perversions of Hoffmanesque compositional principles that I did in college, and I re-learned to paint that way. In trauma literature the part you can't remember or the time of trauma is called 'missing time,' and then you recover it. So I re-learned to paint in this manner and did a series called the 'Thirteen Seasons' in this regressive manner.' (The artist cited at https://www.pbs.org/art21/slideshow/?slide=840&artindex=167)