Mike Kelley (1954, Detroit, MI, USA – 2012, Los Angeles, CA, USA).

Mike Kelley graduated from the University of Michigan in 1976 and received his M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1978, where he studied under John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, David Askevold and Douglas Huebler.

Artist, critic and curator, Kelley was a driving force in contemporary art, working in a range of media and styles, including performance, video, photography, installation, sound works, drawing, sculpture, painting and writing. He frequently collaborated with other artists such as Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler and John Miller and from his early years was part of vivid local music scene, working with the bands like Iggy and the Stooges and Destroy All Monsters.

Kelley began his artistic journey in the late 1970s with solo performances and site-specific installations. He quickly gained prominence and became an influential figure in the art scene of the 1980s with his series of sculptures and installations made from everyday craft materials, worn-out toys, crocheted blankets, fabric dolls, and stuffed animals found at thrift stores and yard sales. Over the years, he created an incredibly diverse, deeply innovative, and often controversial body of work that was simultaneously shocking, humorous, complex, and accessible. These works established his reputation as a provocateur who could consistently make viewers feel uncomfortable and even bewildered.

One of Kelly’s most famous series of works is the “Kandor” installations, which he began in 1990. The series was inspired by the storyline from DC Comics and is dedicated to the futuristic city of Kandor on the planet Krypton, Superman’s home planet. Noting that the depiction of the city in the original stories was inconsistent and fragmented, Kelly created multiple versions of Kandor, presented as architectural models enhanced with LED lighting, sound effects, and video projections. The installation “Kandor-Con 2000” was first presented at a large-scale exhibition at the Bonn Museum of Art, and then at the Technical University of Berlin (2007), Deichtorhallen/Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg (2007); ZKM, Karlsruhe (2008); the Shanghai Biennale (2008); and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010).

Kelley drew inspiration from a wide range of sources, including philosophy, politics, history, underground music, decorative arts, and working-class artistic expression. He merged high and low forms of popular culture, examining class and gender issues, as well as themes of normality, criminality, perversion, memory, trauma, and repression.

“Mike Kelley’s brilliance was rooted in his ability to dig critically into a world of cultural productions, representations, and constructions in all their messy contradictions, using a combination of incisive wit, poetic insight and uncanny associative power.” – Ann Goldstein

Kelley has been a regular participant in the Whitney Bienniale (2012, 2002, 1995, 1993, 1991, 1989, 1985), his works were represented at the Gwangju Biennale (2010), Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (2001), Documenta X (1997) and Documenta IX in Kassel (1992), the 43rd Venice Biennale (1988) and the Fifth Biennale of Sydney (1984).