Mike Kelley is one of the leading artists to emerge from the west coast art scene in the United States since the beginning of the 1990s. He has become widely known for his artistic works involving stuffed animals, textile banners and carpets but his artistic output is far wider and includes drawings, objects, assemblage, collage, performance and video.

Mike Kelley was born in Wayne, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit in 1954. He was brought up with the city's music scene which spawned such bands as Iggy and the Stooges. He moved to Los Angeles in 1976 where he attended the California Institute of the Arts and started to work on a series of projects in which he explored quite a loose or poetic theme, such as The Sublime, Monkey Island and Plato's cave, Lincoln's Profile, using a variety of different media such as drawing, painting, sculpture, performance and writing. Kelley started to get wide recognition outside Los Angeles in the mid-eighties with the sculptural objects and installations from the series Half-a-Man and have since then exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world and participated in major art events such as Documenta 9 . Of his major solo shows can be mentioned his retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York City in 1993.

Kelley's work is inspired by as diverse sources as history, philosophy, politics, underground rock music, decorative arts and working-class artistic expression and some critics would characterize his art as lowbrow or abject art. His art often takes up class and gender issues as well as issues of normality, criminality and perversion.

A selection of representative works

• "Half-a-Man", 1987-91, Series of objects, drawings and installations
• "Pay for Your Pleasure", 1988, Installation
• "Heidi", 1992, Video (in collaboration with Paul McCartney)
• "Mike Kelley's Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for a Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry", 1992, Public Art

External Link

Official site