Mike Kelley

MUSEUMS HAUS LANGE AND HAUS ESTERS
13 MARCH - 19 JUNE 2011

Opening: 13 March 2011, 11:30 a.m., Museum Haus Lange

For a good thirty years U.S. American concept artist Mike Kelley (*1954 Detroit, Michigan, USA) has produced works that present a surprising and provocative analysis of society's handed-down norms and values. On top of which Kelley, who works across the genres, has always placed memories, repression and buried childhood traumas at the centre of his subversive stagings.

The Kandor cycle, which consists of a large number of individual works largely created in 2007, is based in name and content on the fictional birthplace of the comic legend Superman. In the Superman saga, the superhero escapes to earth from the destruction of his home planet, Krypton, but manages to rescue the city of Kandor as its last remaining vestige - albeit in miniature form, which he keeps under a bell jar in his “Fortress of Solitude”. Mike Kelley's Kandor series of sculptures, videos and light boxes revolves around this city. They present cityscapes and silhouettes that all relate directly to the illustrations in the Superman comics. The ever-changing appearance of the self-same city is due to the astonishing fact that the appearance of Kandor was never standardised in the comic. As a constantly maintained relict from Superman's childhood that was forever given a new design, Kandor became an instrument for Kelley to track down the abysses and traumas of memory.

Photo: Ralph Goertz