An exhibition not to be missed perhaps on the occasion of a visit to Paris during the Christmas holidays is the one dedicated to Mike Kelly held at the Paris Stock Exchange. Artist from the Pinault collection who, together with other artists such as Mira Schor and Lee Lozano, contribute together to a harsh or disillusioned portrait of America and its myths, through themes that concern contemporary society in general.
MIKE KELLEY Ghost and Spirit
This new retrospective dedicated to the American artist, among the most influential of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, offers a new look at this major and unclassifiable work, through his most important pieces, some of which belong to the Pinault collection. It is organized by Tate Modern (London), in collaboration with Collezione Pinault (Paris), K21—Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsseldorf) and the Moderna Museet (Stockholm).
The exhibition will be presented first at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris, during the autumn and winter of 2023, before continuing its itinerary
From his student years in Los Angeles, Mike Kelley (1954-2012) seized the performative genre, drawing inspiration from militant feminist practices to highlight proposes an innovative approach to creation, destabilizing its canons. She has participated in several musical groups throughout her life, including the proto-punk band Destroy All Monsters since 1974, and regularly works in collaboration with other artists. Her most famous works are handmade sculptures with squeaky humor, then installations made of plush toys that highlight the gender and commercial conditioning of the youngest. Traumatic memory and the dysfunctions of education are ideas developed throughout her career culminating in the exhibition “Day Is Done” (2005), partially reconstituted at the Bourse de Commerce. “Ghost and Spirit” presents a sequence of different bodies of work or immersive environments created by the artist, among which the spectacular Kandor, cities of the future under glass bells, are presented in the Rotonde. Also cut out the "minor stories": drawings, photographs and preparatory writings that enlighten the visitor on his thoughts. Mike Kelley's work has always been nourished by subcultural references and a tension between the depth of critical thinking that he has developed and the apparent superficiality of a pop aesthetic that sometimes plays on seduction, or a trashy aesthetic. He will not have also stopped staging the role of the artist and the way in which he does it appears or disappears.
Visionary, Mike Kelley was a great explorer of concepts still relevant in the heat of contemporary debates: collective and individual memory, gender relations, social classes... The artist from Detroit (Michigan) is particularly interested in how individual subjectivity is formed from familial and institutional power structures within postmodern capitalist American society. In a note for a performance never performed early in the 80s, Mike Kelley wondered what the difference was between a ghost and a spirit (ghost and spirit): the former ends up disappearing when the latter persists. He thought he was a ghost, yet his spirit still exerts itself, particularly on younger generations of artists.
It is this “lingering influence” of Mike Kelley's spirit that runs through the exhibition
Kandor is the mythical city where Superman comes from on the planet Krypton
Based on about twenty events in which Superman's city is present in the comic (because it is never in the same way), Kelley produced the spectacular Kandors Full Set (2005-2009), a series of colorful resin cities and their imposing glass bells, offer a meditation on memory and collective and utopian architecture, but also on the melancholy of the superhero and the underbelly of myth. Kandor's formal program called for Kelley to be "like Matisse's paintings in three dimensions, which would take on science fiction tones." The video projections of some Bottles (2007) on the walls reinforce the idea of unstable matter. Projected for the first time at the Bourse de Commerce in the same space as the Kandors Full Set, in the heart of a circular pavilion a building which in turn resembles a "bell", evokes the Kryptonian atmosphere. The vast installation Kandors Full Set is preserved within the Pinault Collection and was presented in particular on the occasion of the collective exhibition “Mapping the Studio” at Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in 2009-2011.
