Mike Kelley
Untitled (Allegorical Drawings)
Untitled (Allegorical Drawings)
$375,000
Mike Kelley
Untitled (Allegorical Drawings)
1976
Marker on file card
Suite of 15 drawings from the Untitled (Allegorical Drawings) series
15.2 x 10.2 cm / 6 x 4 in (individual)
23.1 x 18.1 x 3.9 cm / 9 1/8 x 7 ⅛ x 1 ½ in (individual framed)
A driving force of Contemporary art, Mike Kelley produced an eclectic and prolific oeuvre across his decades-long career. His widely varied practice included photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, video, performance, music, curatorial projects, and a formidable body of critical and creative writing. Kelley’s work conflates high and low forms of popular culture through an examination of social relations, cultural identity, and systems of belief, which are underscored by the artist’s idiosyncratic approach to art making.
This selection of fifteen ‘Untitled (Allegorical Drawings)’ (1976) belongs to a larger series of the same name and is displayed in three rows of five respective works. Drawn at the beginning of Kelley’s artistic career in tandem with his involvement in the proto punk art collective Destroy All Monsters (DAM), the series was originally modeled on the then-popular ‘bubble gum cards’ and the drawings were intended to be the basis for DAM paraphernalia such as cards and stickers. The style and imagery of these early works were foundational to Kelley’s practice as a whole: distorted, exaggerated figures — some animalistic, others humanoid, some playfully bulbous and grotesque, others spindly and twisted — take shape beneath the animated strokes of Kelley’s marker and his imagination.
‘I have always appreciated complexity in artworks; the fact that works are high minded or silly is less important than their complexity. That is the true content of the work—its structure.’—Mike Kelley [1]
In response to the prevailing modernist aesthetic Kelley encountered over the course of his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the artist often appropriated iconography from low-end vernacular and counterculture, taking inspiration from comic book artists such as Robert Crumb and Basil Wolverton, pulp fiction, and advertising. The cartoonish elements of ‘Untitled (Allegorical Drawings)’ perfectly encapsulate the relentless examination and scrutiny of American popular culture that marks Kelley’s practice.
Regarded as one of the most significant artists of our time, Kelley’s multifaceted practice challenged the social and cultural conventions of contemporary American society through absurd, comical, and acutely postmodern formulations.
About the artist
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.