Phillips, de Pury & Company,“Deodorized Central Mass With Satellites” (1991-99), an installation by Mike Kelley sold for $2.7 million at Phillips, de Pury & Company. No comment.
Posted on 02/07/2012 2:18:27 PM PST by BenLurkin
Mike Kelley, the daring and influential contemporary installation artist ... has died, police said Wednesday. He was 57.
Kelley's body was found at his home Tuesday night and it appeared he had committed suicide, South Pasadena Police Sgt.
"His work was widely collected and exhibited internationally," said Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "... Artists like that don't come around very often."
Kelley's work will be included in the upcoming 2012 Whitney biennial in New York.
"Mike was an irresistible force in contemporary art," Kelley's studio, Gagosian Gallery, said in a statement that the Los Angeles Times published on its website. "We cannot believe he is gone. But we know his legacy will continue to touch and challenge anyone who crosses its path. We will miss him. We will keep him with us."
Kelley's notable works included a life-size re-creation of his childhood home on wheels, tiny rendition of Superman's extraterrestrial birthplace encased in a glass jug and several spherical sculptures made of stuffed animals.
"His works often violated notions of so called good taste and blurred the boundaries between art, music and popular culture," said Barron.
He erected a life-sized Colonel Sanders statue alongside a miniature Sigmund Freud at the Gagosian in Los Angeles in 2011 and was influenced by old yearbooks for a sprawling 2005 exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in New York that featured a 15-foot-long missile called the "gospel rocket."
Kelley was a student of conceptual artist John Baldessari, and he collaborated with fellow bold artists like Paul McCarthy and Tony Oursler. The band Sonic Youth used Kelley's work on the album cover for "Dirty" released in 1992.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbs8.com ...
Phillips, de Pury & Company,“Deodorized Central Mass With Satellites” (1991-99), an installation by Mike Kelley sold for $2.7 million at Phillips, de Pury & Company. No comment.
“”... Artists like that don’t come around very often.”
Given the above picture, thank God.
If that’s what I had to show for 57 years on the planet, I might suck on the tail pipe too.
Those look like somebody put The California Raisins through a blender.
Looks like the crap I have to pretend to like that my grand-daughter brings home from pre-school.
Looks like somebody put The Fruit of the Loom guys through a blender.
It reminds me of the plush disease microbes from ThinkGeek.com. One of my daughters got “Common Cold” and “Bubonic Plague” with some of her Christmas money.
5 for me for laughing.
After looking at this guys crap I’m beginning to believe that tattoos truly are art.
I did one of those when I was a kid...
“Looks like somebody put The Fruit of the Loom guys through a blender.”
Hysterically funny!!!!
There was a time I taught Arts and Crafts classes and gave the little kids pompoms, cotton balls, ribbon, etc to create some object. Their results looked just like this only smaller.
How daring. How influential.
Not in my neighborhood they don't!
The black-and-white thingie is like if the Wicked Witch of the East were crushed by a falling cow, instead of a house, in the first color sequence of “The Wizard of Oz.”
I’d hesitate to call this stuff “art,” but there’s a bit of silly humor to it, at least.
Yeah, “no comment” was all I could come up with as well.
I love America, where a dude can sell a few pinatas for millions.
I wonder if he’ll be buried, or hung from a ceiling...
Kelley's life-size mannequin of Col. Sanders pulls back a drape to reveal a vitrine in which a tiny figure of Freud, psychoanalyst of childhood trauma complete with phallic cigar, has just stepped off a stage painted in swirling, psychedelic colors. A full-size version of the stage stands behind this sculptural tableau, while its image turns up as the set in a video, where the harem revolts against a princely male intruder. (LA Times)
“I wonder if he’ll be buried, or hung from a ceiling...”
Hung on a wall actually and they’ll call him Art.
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