Opening Reception: Saturday, 21 October, 6 – 9 pm
Organized in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, ‘Mike Kelley: Kandors 1999 – 2011’ is the most comprehensive survey ever mounted of the last body of work by the celebrated late Los Angeles artist. Visually opulent, technically ambitious sculptures, along with videos and large-scale installations, rework the imagery and mythology of the popular American comic book superhero Superman in a meditation on loss, power, and memory. 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, the artist conflated the highest and lowest forms of popular culture into a critical examination of social relations, cultural identity, and systems of belief. Made during the last decade of his life, the sprawling Kandors series draws upon the artist’s longstanding preoccupation with trauma and repression, but also shows him at the height of his powers in formal investigations of color, light, and scale. This exhibition features key Kandors works being shown for the first time in LA, including the installation ‘Kandor-Con 2000’ (1999); the sprawling ‘Kandors Full Set’ (2005 – 2009), with an array of illuminated cities and hand-blown bottles; and the series’ monumental ‘Kandor 10B (Exploded Fortress of Solitude) (2011), an evocation of Superman’s post-apocalyptic sanctum sanctorum, lined in glittering gold objects. The survey also includes early preparatory drawings, works from the Lenticular series, and complex sculptural installations that integrate video narratives from Kelley’s important parallel project, the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series.
Photo caption:
Mike Kelley
Kandor 3, 2007
Mixed media with video projection, sound
Dimensions variable
Art © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Courtesy the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Fredrik Nilsen
