Mike Kelley

MIKE KELLEY opens Metro Pictures' fall exhibition season on September 10, 1988 with new work that includes drawings, banners and furniture-like objects.

In the catalogue for last spring's Kelley exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Howard Singerman characterizes the show as, "constructed of the forms of public speaking, of visual address to an interested audience: posters, banners, cartoons, greeting cards; these are open, made to be read, to be appealing and useful, and to define an audience in their reading."

Kelley uses irreverent often scatological humor and a low brow visual vocabulary to assault high art, high culture authority. His banners, for example, are simple graphic images that refer to Catholic church art and Sister Mary Corita's popularization of late Matisse as well as to more commercial 60's liberal sentiments.

Mike Kelley, who lives in Los Angeles, has exhibited at Metro Pictures since 1982. He has also done performance pieces at the Kitchen and Artists Space. His work was included in the Aperto '88 section of this summer's Venice Biennale and in recent exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.