Author Description

The Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley is widely considered among the most important of his generation. This mini-retrospective catalogue considers Kelley in an unusual light--not as the consummate Postmodern artist, as he is usually portrayed, but as a simultaneously devout Modernist. Essayist Justin Lieberman writes, "When we see the handmade stuffed animals and crocheted afghans in Kelley's Arenas, it is not his activities in this studio that come to mind, but the emotional histories that these objects carried with them before they even arrived there: their creation as gifts, their cherished status (or not) as tokens of love and affection, and their ultimate discarding into a yard-sale bin where he acquired them. Kelley's use of the conventions of Modernist sculpture in his deployment of these focal points of love and loss is violently at odds with their sentimental nature, and this highly engineered dichotomy is exactly what brings that nature to light."