A look at: Mike Kelley

Information helps most when making it accessible in an orderly manner, which is why we put together the basic basic information from the life of this artist in this category-as a comfortable starting basis for closer employment with this artist and his work:

Mike Kelley was born on October 27, 1954 and died (presumably) at the age of 57 on January 31, 2012.

Place of birth, parents, school

Mike Kelley was born in Detroit, the formerly famous Autostadt in the American state of Michigan. It is known from his family that Kelley and his four siblings were strictly brought up in the Roman Catholic faith that his father was a school caretaker and his mother worked as a cook in the canteen of the Ford works.

First traces of artistic talent

Mike Kelley is said to have shown interest and talent for art as a student, was stamped into a nerd in the Detroit school where his father worked as a caretaker. He has never forgotten the jammed suburban milieu and his consequent humiliations and processed many times in his early works, but did not want to be reduced to his biography.

Training as an artist

Mike Kelley first studied art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he completed the BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) in 1976, and then switched to California Institute of the Arts , Valencia, where he passed the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in 1978.

At the California Institute of the Arts, painting and photography, music and video, performing arts and theory were taught under one roof, a very unusual approach for the time, in the possibilities of which Kelley tried out in all directions.

The way to your own style

His first works show Kelley in the middle of the phase of rebellion against his upbringing , he processes pictures from childhood and buried memories, deals with the subcultures that he had escaped at a young age.

The conversion of his petty -bourgeois parents grew against the Mainstream , against the clean men in America.

Early works criticize the American mass culture and the art of trash, which he vexes in his installations with shattered soft toys.

At the time of his life, Kelley struck back, with ambiguous photos and videos of high school traditions, bizarre images of beauty tapes and costume festivals, with videos and performance, painting and images made of "pleasing material", always controversial and not only of those whose culture drop he took.

The artistic breakthrough

With precisely such installations, Kelley was finally known in the general public around 1986, entire room installations with snappy kitsch , crochet cocks and old plush toys and flea market dolls, which came together to irritating to disturbing groups.

The working group "Half A Man" , 1987 - 1991, also in this style, finally brought him the international breakthrough. In 1992, the band "Sonic Youth" one of his crochet creatures on the cover of their new album "Dirty", and the first edition contained a photography on which Kelley depicted the performance artists Sherry Rose and Bob Flanagan naked, in offensive poses with almost large fabric dolls. This brought this even more popular in the double sense of the word "art creatures" and its creator.

Kelley did not really see his soft toys as animals, but as babies, as a "sexless humanoid", clean and made of plush and cute. Plush toys would be given babies to tell them how they should be.

Such goals are absolutely classic and inhuman. For Kelley, they stood for the pursuit of a kind of Christian perfection that was unreachable, especially for babies, as he once said in an interview.

Famous works of art by Mike Kelley

There are many famous works of art by Mike Kelley, especially from 1986 to 1992:

• Animal Self and Friend of the Animals, 1987
• Black-Eyed Susan, 1987
• Pay for your Pleasure, 1988
• The Renaissance Society, 1988

They are always diverse and always imaginative, never just to understand pretty and never straight away.

What kind of art does Mike Kelley do?

Every art that came up with him with every material that he remembered. His training, which was not limited to a field, gave him a wide variance in terms of expression, his tendency to underground, lots of weird ideas.

Mike Kelley is classified as an installation artist and as a performance artist , influenced by pop culture, mass culture and porn culture, his work and texts deal with worldview systems as well as the psychological dependencies of people captured in these worldview systems.

Mike Kelley was also musically interested, and a connection between music and art . Disco and Country Rock ruled in the middle of the 1970s, and pop music had lost every “avant-garde” relevance, while the music of the time before (jazz, folk, psychedelic) was unattended to the world of art and art production.

Most of the lecturers at the training facilities of art were convinced that all forms of popular culture were understood, students were uninterested, rock music was there to dance at parties and definitely no art.

Then the British punk and gave Pop Art a new life, which, however, quickly lost every reference to art with the emergence of the "design bands". Mike Kelley wanted to change that, he went to the California Institute of the Arts to study at Morton Subotnik , one of the first luminaries in the field of electronic music .

This finally emerged "The Poetics" with Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler, the first "art band" that emerged from the California Institute of the Arts. "The Poetics" was a room for Kelley and Oursler (especially from 1977 - 1983) as well as a room for the most explanatory experimental art as a punk band, and numerous installations were created, which were e.g. B. 2013 by Tony Oursler as "The Poetics Project" in the Paris Center Pompidou.

Exhibition by Mike Kelley in the Moma

What art style stands for?

As I said, installation art and performance art, but also graphic art on paper and painting, video installations and films and music art projects.

His name is closely linked to the movement of the New Gothic Art , which has its name from a neo-Gothic art manifesto that Gothic artist Charles Moffat wrote in 2001. This subculture was about rebellion against normality , and Mike Kelley was involved in the Gothic exhibition, which in 1997 shaped the style of the artist group in Boston.

It was an exhibition by the Institute of Contemporary Art of Boston , on which, apart from Kelley, Ua Robert Gober, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gregory Crewdson, Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman and Kelley's friend Tony Oursler.

He is also attributed to the lowbrow style "surf culture" and "Kustom Culture" of the 1950s and the beginnings of the underground comix . which was also "Pop Surrealism", matched Kelley's work well, paintings, sculptures and installations are characteristic, in which material of pop culture , based on the model of the surrealists and fantastic realists, are processed in a playful and base.

Mike Kelley's role models

Kelley had important teachers, concept artist John Baldessari and the performer Laurie Anderson that they are said to have left traces in his work. Kelley himself stated that Chris Burden and Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci and the Viennese actionist were impressed.

Important supporters of Mike Kelley

The sponsors of Kelley include not only his well -known teachers, but also the approximately 10 years older Paul McCarthy , who made a number of co -productions with Kelley that increased Kelley's prominence in the early 1990s.

Mike Kelley as a political artist

Mike Kelley was a first -rank political artist who keeps dealing with the repressed and subcultural phenomena in his work. Kelley's policy was social policy, the life of people among themselves, for him the basis of every political development.

Kelley caricated building art , with the message: "Let's talk about disobedient", the children's book "Heidi" processed to present child abuse, drew children's comic characters about castration, the Oedipus complex and broken family structures.

Interview with Mike Kelley from 2004 (in English)

Outstanding in Mike Kelley's life's work

Mike Kelley is an artist who claims all the senses of his viewer to an outstanding extent. An artistic synaesthet that puts the recipient about haptic, visual, acoustic and olfactory challenges, often with a disturbing effect.

Important exhibitions and awards from Mike Kelley - an overview

Kelley frequently exhibited in Germany in 1992, in Documenta 9, 1995 in the Munich House of Art and in 1997 together with Tony Oursler at Documenta X. In 2007 he excited about the sculpture.

In 2008 he was seen in the Goetz collection in Munich, in 2011 in solo exhibitions in the Haus Lange Krefeld and in the Schinkel-Pavillon Berlin, and he was seen in a total of around 100 exhibitions in Germany.

In the USA, Kelley was exhibited almost 300 times, a good 50 times in France, in Italy and Great Britain by 40 times.

Kelley has received numerous awards:

• 1984 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award
• 1985 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Grant
• 1987 Awards in the Visual Arts Grant
• 1990 National Endowment for the Arts Museum Program Exhibition Grant
• 1986 Artists Space Interarts Grant
• 1997 Skowhegan Medal in Mixed Media
• 1998 The University of Michigan School of Art and Design Distinguished Alumnus Award
• 2000 the California Institute of the Arts Distinguished Alumnus Award
• 2003 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
• 2006 Wolfgang-Hahn Prize

Scandale around Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley caused many scandals with his art, but the greatest scandal was his death : on January 31, 2012 he was found lifeless in his house in Los Angeles, the police went out suicide.

What does a work of art by Mike Kelley cost?

Never little: In 2007, the "Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites" from 1991 was auctioned by the Phillips de Pury & Company for $ 2.7 million. Since his suicide, his works have increased in the price on the international market.

A quote from Mike Kelley to his art

Mike Kelley's most famous quote is certainly that of the plush toy, which he describes as the "ideological model of a baby that is given to him to tell him how it should be ".

Also handed down by him: "In the past, I understood why artists were popular or had success - even if I didn't like their work. Today everything looks so arbitrary."

Inheritance and post -effect in today's world

Mike Kelley is considered one of the most important contemporary artists in the world , his works are not only sold expensive, but are also highly desired in the international museums.

It has a great influence on the current generation of artists today, even if they are somewhat more gentle in resistance than Kelley in the 1980s.

The artist's current ranking

On the international “bestseller list of art” ranked # 17 in 2014, two years after his death .

Literature tips for the artist and his time

Interesting reading “Hidden Stories: Armin Boehm, Olaf Breuning, Nigel Cooke, Mike Kelley” from Arthena Foundation KAI 10 room for art is ready for German art interesters. Here Kelley's work is compared to the work of the Berliner Armin Boehm, the work of the Swiss Olaf Breuning, who lives in New York and the work of the American Nigel Cooke, all three of the generation to Kelley.

Like Kelley, all three deal with border areas between reality and fiction, consciousness and hiddenness, rationalism and abstraction and creates as well as critical and utopian counter -designs of reality, visions of freedom, the Kelley's work kept alive. Published by Kerber Verlag, 1st edition on July 19, 2012.

... further recommendations for this artist:

Exciting links to Mike Kelley

The most exciting link is always the original: at Mikekelley.com you will find the artist's website, with many pictures of his works and many other information.