Mike Kelley – Jerry Meandering

A focused exhibition of Mike Kelley's works on paper, prints, mixed-media drawings and collages from his undergraduate years, some shown publicly for the first time. About This November, in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Hauser & Wirth will present 'Mike Kelley: Jerry Meandering,' an exhibition focused on the artist's works on paper, some of which will be shown publicly for the first time. Bringing together prints, mixed-media drawings and collages created during Kelley's undergraduate years at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1972 – 1976), the exhibition—which takes its name from a suggestive print of Gerald Ford and his wife made in 1976—offers a rare look at his earliest experimentations with form, material and the unstable meanings our culture assigns to images. The presentation also features a selection of Kelley's Untitled (Collages 1974 – 2011) works, a series he revisited and altered near the end of his life, reflecting his enduring interest in memory, repression and the construction of personal and cultural histories. Mike Kelley is widely considered one of the most influential artists of our time. Originally from a suburb outside of Detroit, Kelley attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before moving to Southern California in 1976 to study at California Institute of the Arts from which he received an MFA in 1978. The city of Los Angeles became his adopted home and the site of his prolific art practice. In much of his work, Kelley drew from a wide spectrum of high and low culture, and was known to scour flea markets for America's cast-offs and leftovers. Mining the banal objects of everyday life, Kelley elevated these materials to question and dismantle Western conceptions of contemporary art and culture. Starting out in the late 1970s, Kelley became known for performance and installation based works; he came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of common craft materials and stuffed animals. His work later widened in scope and physical scale, exemplified by 'Educational Complex' (1995), the 'Kandors' series (1999 – 2011), 'Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction' series (2000 – 2011), and the posthumously completed public work 'Mobile Homestead' (2006 – 2013). These projects invoked a vast range of media and forms, illustrating the artist's versatility and underscored a number of Kelley's recurrent themes, such as repressed memory, sexuality, adolescence, class, and Americana, which were central to his artistic praxis. Throughout his career, Kelley also worked on curatorial projects, collaborated with many artists and musicians, and produced a formidable body of critical and creative writing. Read more Toggle Mixed media Drawing Prints