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 ...
ping
Your post to me did have me wondering where the connection was. :=)
man that is funny and so true......they bring home stuff and all we can do it smile and clap like a wind up monkey when really we wonder what is that? the grandson brought a glue cotton ball thingie that looked like dingleberries on toilet paper,but we laughed and clapped
RIP.
If he died on the floor, they would call him ‘Matt’
Very brave.
Bold and courageous.
I don’t get it man, I just don’t get it. I’m in the wrong line of work!
I love it! Too bad there’s no place for comments after the article. Your’s would have been a perfect one.
Or if he died in the pool - Bob.
Or died in the ocean and sank....Sandy
It’s a dangerous line of work!
Wonder how much taxpayer support this “artist” received for his stuff, and which Mickey D he would have worked at if not for the support.
I like that.
This is not widely known, but before Picasso painted his models, he took them out and got them shiftfaced.
“No comment.”
Actually it says a lot about the SICKENING MATERIALISM in today’s culture. If you’re not able to understand it, that’s your problem...us, more sophisticated people, have no problem understanding that the red, white, and blue thingie on the right represents Ronald Reagan, who represented nothing but materialism. I think with that clue, you can figure out what the others represent.
“Looks like the crap I have to pretend to like that my grand-daughter brings home from pre-school.”
LOL. You have to tell junior that it’s crap, if it’s crap. My kids know that if I say something good, I mean it, since the other 80% of the time I tell them that their crap, is, well, crap.
But I will concede that it things will get trickier as a grandparent (God willing).
If I can make something that looks just like it, it ain’t art.
LOL! Actually the little disease plushies are a lot cuter than that hanging bunch of crap!
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