Mike Kelley
City 17, 2007–09
Mixed media, Overall: 83 15/16 × 17 ⅛ × 17 ⅛ inches (213.2 × 43.5 cm), edition of 5
Mike Kelley
Limpid Pool, 1987
Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood, 60 × 48 inches (152.4 × 121.9 cm)
Mike Kelley, Twinkling Coppers (from “Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile”), 1986
Acrylic on canvas with penny and string of multicolored flashing electrical Christmas lights, 60 × 60 × 3 ⅜ inches (152.4 × 152.4 × 8.6 cm)
© Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All rights reserved/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photo: © Douglas M. Parker Studio
Positing cerebral concepts from psychology, philosophy, and art theory against kitschy craft mediums, awkward adolescent scenarios, and rudimentary renderings, Mike Kelley’s oeuvre works against art’s hierarchical history as it expands its breadth. His 2005 project, “Day Is Done,” is a massive, amorphous collection of works in diverse media that reconstruct purported “repressed memories” of generic high–school activities as recorded in anonymous yearbook photographs. He scrutinizes moments of ritual and tradition by restaging scenes common in American adolescence, such as school dances and Halloween activities, investigating the moral and experiential subtexts of these events in the process.
Mike Kelley was born in 1954 in Detroit, Michigan, and died in 2012 in Los Angeles, California. He received his B.A. in 1976 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his M.F.A. in 1978 from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. Recent solo exhibitions include “Categorical Imperative and Morgue,” Van Abbemuseum, Stedelijk, The Netherlands (2000); “Sod and Sodie Sock (w/Paul McCarthy),” Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon, Institut d’art contemporain, France (2003); “Mike Kelley–The Uncanny,” The Tate Liverpool, England (2004, traveled to MUMOK, Museum of Modern Art, Vienna); “Profounders vertes,” Musée du Louvre, Paris (2006); “Day is Done Judson Church Dance,” Judson Memorial Church, New York (2009); “Themes and Variations from 35 Years,” The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2012); “Mobile Homestead,” Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Michigan (2013); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013); “An Homage to Mike Kelley,” MoMA PS1, New York (2013); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2014).
On the occasion of two exhibitions—one at Gagosian, London, and the other at Kistefos in Jevnaker, Norway—the Quarterly shares an essay included in the forthcoming book Kathleen Ryan: 2014–24. Here, Harry Thorne writes on Kathleen Ryan’s artistic process, methods of assemblage, and how her studio resembles an excavation site.
The Summer 2025 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Pablo Picasso’s Nu accoudé (1961) on the cover.
At the center of Andreas Gursky’s new exhibition in Paris at Gagosian’s rue de Castiglione gallery is Paris, Montparnasse II (2025), a reengagement with his celebrated photograph from 1993 of the architect Jean Dubuisson’s iconic building in the capital city. In the new work, Gursky reexamines the subject, tracing the changes time has inscribed on the architecture and its occupants. Here, in conversation with the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier and shown alongside behind-the-scenes images from the artwork’s making, the artist addresses his motivations and interests in this long-term project.
For Art Basel 2025, the fair has commissioned Katharina Grosse to create CHOIR, a large-scale, site-responsive painting for the Messeplatz Project. The curator for the project, Natalia Grabowska, met with Grosse in her studio in Berlin ahead of the work’s creation to talk through the process; Grosse’s approach to the specifics of the Messeplatz’s architecture; and the importance of unscripted encounters.
On April 18, the exhibition Picasso: Tête-à-tête opened at Gagosian, New York. Including works from 1896 to 1972, the full span of the artist’s career, the show is presented in partnership with Paloma Picasso, the artist’s daughter. Here, Michael Cary, one of the organizers of the exhibition, traces the historical precedents that informed the conversational nature of the curation. He also introduces a translation of a 1932 interview with Picasso by the publisher and critic E. Tériade, often quoted in English in part but not in full.
On the occasion of Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting, curated by Cecilia Alemani and comprising paintings from 1944 through 1986 and two sculptures, the Quarterly revisits a conversation between Albert Oehlen and John Corbett from 2013. The pair reflect on de Kooning’s late work and its lasting influence on them.
Architect Carlo Ratti has long worked at the crossroads of technology, design, and urban planning to see how digital tools can help create smarter cities. On the occasion of Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.—the Venice Architecture Biennale he curated, on view until November 23, 2025—Bartolomeo Sala asks him about the ideas driving his curatorship, what he means by architecture of adaptation in the face of climate change, and how different types of intelligence—natural, artificial, and collective—will be shaping the cities of the future.
From her Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna to her casting of George Orwell’s World War II office at the BBC, Rachel Whiteread has long engaged with the emotional and historical complexities of addressing deeply troubling moments in human history through art. This month, Whiteread will debut a new work for the inaugural exhibition at the Goodwood Art Foundation in Sussex, England.
Sydney Stutterheim traces the linkages and affinities between the work of Richard Prince and that of Bob Dylan. Using Prince’s Untitled (Dylan) as a starting point, she considers the artist’s enduring interest in questions of originality and authorship, as well as his sustained relationship with the worlds of American music and counterculture.
In this ongoing series, the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the second installment of 2025, we are honored to present the philosopher and playwright Hélène Cixous.
In 1990, postmodern dance pioneer Molissa Fenley performed Bardo at Keith Haring’s funeral. She created the piece as an homage to the artist and the creative friendship that he and Fenley had developed since they first met in Haring’s hometown of Kutztown, Pennsylvania. In honor of the thirty-fifth anniversary of Haring’s passing and with the support of the New York City AIDS Memorial, Fenley restaged the work with an ensemble cast on May 4, 2025, at the LGBT Community Center. Here, Fenley speaks with Tess Michaelson about the passage of time, the truthfulness of performance, and the expansion of empathic experience.
The second installment of a short story by Catherine Lacey.
