Biography from AskART:
| Best known for his soft sculpture, especially worn and dirty soiled stuffed animals in sexual positions in cold, clinical settings, Mike Kelley has been a major figure in contemporary American art in the later half of the 20th century.
A resident of Los Angeles, he was born in Detroit, Michigan, and from 1972 to 1976, studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and in 1976 at the California Institute of the Arts.
In the 1980s, his stuffed animal pieces began to get much attention. His work has been exhibited at Whitney Biennials, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Hirshorn Museum in Washington D. C. , and in 1993, a full-scale exhibition of his work was shown at the Whitney Museum. From that time, he has pursued what he calls "projects," a cluster of concepts that he works on intermittently including a reconstruction of Mark Rothko's "Chapel," and an installation mounted beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.
In 1997, an exhibition called "Poetics Project" showed the collaborative efforts of Kelley and Tony Oursler in video, painting, and sculpture. In 1999, a traveling exhibition of his 1988 installation "Pay for your Pleasure," intended to be a meditation on the relationship between creativity and violence, was cancelled by the Seattle Art Museum because it included artwork by a convicted criminal.
Source:
"Art Forum", April 2003
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Mike Kelley is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Sculptors
California Painters
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