Mike Kelley 1954–2012

The influential US artist Mike Kelley has died, aged 57.

Born in 1954 in Wayne, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, Kelley was educated at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Los Angeles, where he was taught by artists including Laurie Anderson, David Askevold, John Baldessari, Robert Cumming and Douglas Huebler.

Kelley’s singular and wildly imaginative work evolved across a broad spectrum of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance and video, effortlessly colliding the high-minded and serious with the esoteric and profane. As art historian John C. Welchman put it, Kelley’s art was ‘a blazing network of focused conflations’ that, in examining American life, put to use subjects as diverse as the uncanny, psychoanalysis, high school life, abjection, autobiography, ufology, Repressed Memory Syndrome, Superman, classical philosophy, the counter-culture and punk – the spirit of which was arguably an abiding characteristic of his activities. These activities also encompassed experimental music and writing. He was a founder member in 1974 of the influential band Destroy All Monsters (along with Cary Loren, Niagara, and Jim Shaw), and also made music as The Poetics (with Tony Oursler), and Gobbler (with Art Byington, Cameron Jamie, Paul McCarthy, and Dave Muller). His essays and criticism – collected in the books Foul Perfection (2003) and Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals (2004) – were as perceptive, witty, scholarly, passionate and wide-ranging in subject-matter as his artwork.

Solo exhibitions included ‘Monkey Island and Confusion’, Metro Pictures, New York (1982); ‘Catholic Tastes’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1993); ‘Mike Kelley,’ Museu d’art Contemporani, Barcelona (1997); ‘Framed and Framed, Test Room, Sublevel,’ MAGASIN, Grenoble (1999); ‘The Uncanny,’ Tate Liverpool and Museum Moderne Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (2004); ‘Day is Done’, Gagosian Gallery, New York (2005), ‘Profondeurs Vertes,’ Musée du Louvre (2006); and ‘Educational Complex Onwards: 1995-2008,’ at the WIELS Centre d’Art Contemporain (2008). He exhibited extensively in group exhibitions in the US and internationally, including Skulptur Projekte Münster ’07, the 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008) and Performa ’09, New York. Kelley’s work was shown in six editions of the Whitney Biennial, with a seventh appearance scheduled for this year’s biennial, due to open on 1 March. Prizes included the Wolfgang Hahn prize, Society of Modern Art, Museum Ludwig (2006); the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2003); The California Institute of the Arts Distinguished Alumnus Award (2000); Skowhegan Medal for Mixed Media (1997) and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Associated Press (AP) reports that Kelley was found at his home in Los Angeles on Tuesday 31 January. According to AP, South Pasadena police said the apparent cause of death was suicide but that no further information or confirmation was currently available.

In a statement released by Kelley’s studio, his friends and colleagues described him as ‘Unstintingly passionate, habitually outspoken and immeasurably creative in every genre or material with which he took up – and that was most of them, from performance and sculpture to painting, installation and video, from experimental music to writing in a thousand voices [… ] Mike was an irresistible force in contemporary art… 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.’