 |
| Mike Kelley At Hauser And Wirth |
10 Sep - 24 Oct, Hauser & Wirth New York, 18th Street
Opening: Thursday 10 September 6 - 8 pm
New York... Beginning September 10th 2015, Hauser & Wirth is proud to present 'Mike Kelley', the gallery's first exhibition devoted to one of the most ambitious and influential artists of our time. Organized in collaboration with the Mike Kelley foundation for the Arts, the exhibition is the first in New York to focus exclusively on one of the most significant of Kelley's later series, Kandors. These visually opulent, technically ambitious sculptures combine with videos and a sprawling installation never before exhibited in the United States, as the late Los Angeles artist reworks the imagery and mythology of the popular American comic book hero, Superman, into an extraordinary opus of nurture and loss, destruction, mourning and - possibly - redemption. 'Mike Kelley' will remain on view at Hauser & Wirth's downtown location at 511 West 18th Street through October 24, 2015.
Kelley's Kandors (1999, 2007, 2009, 2011) is named for Superman's birthplace, the capital of the planet Krypton. According to the comic book legend, Superman's father Jor-El sent his infant son to safety on Earth before Krypton's destruction, saving his life but inadvertently sentencing Superman to a future of displacement, loneliness, and longing. Superman grows up believing that Kandor was stolen by intergalactic archvillain Brainiac, prior to Krypton's demise, shrunken to a miniature metropolis, and left trapped inside a glass bottle. Superman ultimately wrestles Kandor away from Brainiac and hides it in his Fortress of Solitude, sustaining its citizens with tanks of Kryptonic atmosphere. As Kelley once explained, Kandor functions for Superman as 'a perpetual reminder of his inability to escape the past, and his alienated relationship to his present world.'
Over the course of his four -decade career, Kelley (1954 - 2012) produced a provocative and rich oeuvre that include drawing, painting and sculpture, video and photography, performance, music, and a formidable body of critical writing. Kelley's art conflates the highest and lowest forms of popular culture in a relentless critical examination of social relations, cultural identity, and systems of belief. Mingling the sacred and profane, the banal and absurd, in the innocent and perverse, in the comic and the tragic, Kelley's art launches an assault on the purity of aesthetic convention, spearheaded by the artist's dark humor. Engaging themes as varied as adolescence, educational structures, sexuality, religion, post-punk politics, pop-psychology and repressed memory, Kelley works through the turbulent conditions of the American vernacular to reveal unexpected connections and expose the defaults, tensions and contradictions that make it up...
