Legendary Artist Mike Kelley Dead at 58, an Apparent Suicide

Legendary Artist Mike Kelley Dead at 58, an Apparent Suicide

Artist Mike Kelley has passed away at his home in Los Angeles, having ostensibly taken his own life. The tragical news program was confirmed to BLOUIN ARTINFO by Helene Winer, of New York’s Metro Images gallery, a long-time companion of the musician.

“It is completely shocking that someone would decide to do this, someone who has succeeder and fame and selections,” said Winer. “It’s exceedingly sad.” She added that the musician had been pressed down.

Kelley was born in 1954 in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. He became affected in the city’s music scene as a teen, and while a scholar at the University of Michigan, shaped the influential proto-punk band Destroy All Monsters with colleague artists Jim Shaw, Niagara, and Cary Loren (a retrospective given to Destroy All Monsters was held at L.A.’s Prism gallery last year). Together, the band hatched a style of performance that skirted the edge of performance art.

After calibrating college in 1976, he moved to Los Angeles to attend the California Institute of the Arts, studying alongside teachers like John Baldessari and Laurie Anderson. Music continued to be a constant passion : he organized another band, “Poetics,” with fellow CalArts scholars John Miller and Tony Oursler.

Kelley’s career took off in the early 1990s, with solo appearances at the Whitney, LACMA, and other international venues. He and Oursler organised a well-recived induction a kinda memorial to punk at Documenta X in 1997. In the early 2000s, he began exposing with Gagosian Gallery after 20 years with Metro Pictures.

For his 2005 exhibition “Day is Done,” Kelley filled Gagosian with found annual photos, video recording footage, and automated article of furniture, inspiring New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz to describe the show as an example of “clusterfuck aesthetics.” More conventionally, he was associated with the notion of “abject art,” highlighting the irrational and the repugnant.

Kelly’s work will be admited in the upcoming Whitney Biennial. It is the eighth time his work has been included in the biannual exhibition. According to the New York Multiplication, he was also in the process of putting together a show for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Kelley’s studio turned a statement to the L.A. Times saying, “Mike was an resistless force in contemporary art… We can not believe he is gone. But we know his bequest will continue to touch and challenge anyone who crosses its path. We will miss him. We will keep him with us.”

“Mike Kelley was as kind and generous a collaborator as I could possibly go for for,” said curator Dan Nadel, who organised Prism’s retrospective for “Destroy All Monsters.” “I ‘m extremely grateful to have processed with him, and will be forever thankful to him for his solitaire and the training he gave me, perhaps without even realizing it. And, besides his singular genius, I’ll always commemorate his rolling, infectious laughter, which was a joy to lay eyes on.”

source : artinfo