Mike Kelley

The first thorough look at Mike Kelley's riotous, irreverent and colorful paintings Featuring paintings from series that span a 15-year period, 1994 through 2009, this volume traces Mike Kelley's (1954-2012) engagement with the medium through bodies of work including The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter), a series of oval-shaped paintings on wood; Timeless Painting, which marked Kelley's distinct return to painting in color, and which he described as "mannerist take-offs on Hans Hofmann's compositional theory of 'push and pull'"; the Horizontal Tracking Shots series; as well as works made under the umbrella of his expansive and ambitious Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions, a series related to the Educational Complex artwork. Kelley's seminal mixed-media installation Profondeurs Vertes, his ode to the influential paintings in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts that captivated him as a young person, is also featured. The publication includes texts by various contemporary visual artists responding to Kelley's art: Edgar Arceneaux, Carroll Dunham, Daniel Guzmán, Richard Hawkins, Jay Heikes, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Mary Reid Kelley, Christina Quarles and Laurie Simmons.

Mike Kelley's "Arenas" series of the late 80s and early 90s mark a shift away from the artist's performance-oriented activity and towards a new sculptural dexterity, in which cultural resonance is elicited from an eerie reframing of everyday objects. First exhibited in 1990 at Metro Pictures, the "Arenas" are comprised of stuffed animals arranged around the edges of blankets (or occasionally posed isolate in their center). Ten or twenty such toys in such groupings might convey a cheery childhood picnic scenario, but Kelley rarely selects more than five or six, and places them carefully so that their cuddliness and their capacity to comfort is entirely canceled out. Instead, we encounter the toy as a commodity entity-a mass-manufactured product positioned to enter into play but far from inviting it. Skarstedt's exhibition of seven of the eleven "Arenas" is here recorded in superb installation shots and with critical commentary. - from publisher.

A catalogue documenting the last two exhibitions of new work by American artist Mike Kelley, held in 2011 at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles and London. Mike Kelley made nostalgia, memory, and repression in everyday life the topics of his idiosyncratic sculptures, performances, paintings, and installations, which conflate vernacular sources and high modernist aesthetics. A veteran of the Los Angeles conceptual art scene, Kelley used deconstructive strategies in order to challenge the established norms of contemporary culture, both high and low.

Critical writings and commentary by the Los Angeles based artist Mike Kelley. The work of artist Mike Kelley (b. 1954) embraces performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, and sculpture. Drawing distinctively on high art and vernacular traditions, including historical research, popular culture, and psychology, Kelley came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of craft materials. His recent work offers dialogues with architecture and with repressed memory syndrome, and a sustained inquiry into his own aesthetic and social history. The subjects on which Kelley has written are as varied as his artistic media. They include the work of fellow artists, sound, caricature, the uncanny, UFOlogy, and gender-bending. This book offers a diverse collection of Kelley's writings from the last twenty-five years. It contains major critical texts on art, film, and the wider culture, including his piece on the aesthetic he calls "urban Gothic." It also contains essays, mostly commissioned for exhibition catalogs and journals, on the artists and groups David Askevold, Öyvind Fahlström, Douglas Huebler, John Miller, Survival Research Laboratories, and Paul Thek, among others. Kelley's voices are passionate, analytic, and ironic, and his critical intelligence is leavened with touches of whimsy.

Erweiterte Neuauflage des legendären Arnheim-Katalogs von 1993 in zwei Auflagen: Im März die rein englische Ausgabe anlässlich der Ausstellung in der Tate Liverpool, im Juli 2004 eine Ausgabe mit deutschem Textanhang mit einem zusätzlichen Interview mit Mike Kelley anlässlich der Ausstellung im Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Wien. Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Wien, Juli 2004

An illustrated examination of a 1995 work by Mike Kelley that marked a significant change in his work. One of the most influential artists of our time, Mike Kelley (1954–2012) produced a body of innovative work mining American popular culture as well as modernist and postmodernist art—relentless examinations of subjectivity and of society that are both sinister and ecstatic. With a wide range of media, Kelley's work explores themes as varied as post-punk politics, religious systems, social class, and repressed memory. Using architectural models to represent schools he attended, his 1995 work, Educational Complex, presents forgotten spaces as frames for private trauma, real or imagined. The work's implications are at once miniature and massive. In this book, John Miller offers an illustrated examination of this milestone work that marked a significant change in Kelley's practice. A “complex” can mean an architectural configuration, a psychological syndrome, or a political apparatus, and Miller approaches Educational Complex through corresponding lines of inquiry, considering the making of the work, examining it in terms of education and trauma (sexual or otherwise), and investigating how it tests the ideological horizon of art as an institution. Miller shows that in Educational Complex, Kelley expands his political and aesthetic focus, including not only such artifacts as generic forms of architecture but (inspired by the infamous McMartin Preschool case) popular fantasies associated with ritual sex abuse and false memory syndrome. Through this archaeology of the contemporary, Miller argues, Kelley examines the mandate for education and the liberal democratic premises underpinning it.

Focuses on work by the three artists from the 1970s through the 1990s. Examines their participation in subcultural music scenes and discovers a common political strategy which lead them to create strange and unseemly imates that test the limites of art, gender roles, sex, acceptable behavior, poor taste, and the gag reflex.