Mike Kelley
Kandor 4
2007
Mixed media with video projection
Part 1 with bottle: 161.3 x 325.1 x 242.6 cm /
63 1/2 x 128 x 95 1/2 in
Part 2 with cities: 142.2 x 265.7 x 95.3 cm /
56 x 104 5/8 x 37 1/2 in
Overall dimensions variable
Mike Kelley
Kandor 10B (Exploded Fortress of Solitude)
2011
Mixed media
289.6 x 1524 x 2286 cm / 114 x 600 x 900 in
© Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts
All Rights Reserved / Licensed by
VAGA, New York NY
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Fredrik Nilsen
Mike Kelley at Hauser & Wirth New York Hauser & Wirth presents ‘Mike Kelley’, the gallery’s first exhibition devoted to one of the most ambitious and influential artists of our time. 10 September – 24 October 2015.]]>
Source: Hauser & Wirth New York
Organized in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the exhibition is the first in New York to focus exclusively on one of the most significant of Kelley’s later series, Kandors. These visually opulent, technically ambitious sculptures combine with videos and a sprawling installation never before exhibited in the United States, as the late Los Angeles artist reworks the imagery and mythology of the popular American comic book hero, Superman, into an extraordinary opus of nurture and loss, destruction, mourning and – possibly – redemption. ‘Mike Kelley’ will remain on view at Hauser & Wirth’s downtown location at 511 West 18th Street through October 24, 2015.
Kelley’s Kandors (1999, 2007, 2009, 2011) is named for Superman’s birthplace, the capital of the planet Krypton. According to the comic book legend, Superman’s father Jor-El sent his infant son to safety on Earth before Krypton’s destruction, saving his life but inadvertently sentencing Superman to a future of displacement, loneliness, and longing. Superman grows up believing that Kandor was destroyed, but later discovers his real home still exists: Kandor was stolen by intergalactic archvillain Brainiac prior to Krypton’s demise, shrunken to a miniature metropolis, and left trapped inside a glass bottle. Superman ultimately wrestles Kandor away from Brainiac and hides it in his Fortress of Solitude, sustaining its citizens with tanks of Kryptonic atmosphere. As Kelley once explained, Kandor functions for Superman as ‘a perpetual reminder of his inability to escape the past, and his alienated relationship to his present world.’
Over the course of his four-decade career, Kelley (1954 – 2012) produced a provocative and rich oeuvre that included drawing, painting and sculpture, video and photography, performance, music, and a formidable body of critical writing. Kelley’s art conflates the highest and lowest forms of popular culture in a relentless critical examination of social relations, cultural identity, and systems of belief. Mingling the sacred and profane, the banal and absurd, the innocent and perverse, the comic and the tragic, Kelley’s art launches an assaulton the purity of aesthetic convention, spearheaded by the artist’s dark humor. Engaging themes as varied asadolescence, educational structures, sexuality, religion, post-punk politics, pop psychology and repressedmemory, Kelley works through the turbulent conditions of the American vernacular to reveal unexpectedconnections and expose the defaults, tensions, and contradictions that make it up.
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