Category: Artist
Nationality: American
Last Year: 26

There are few artists able to turn the froth of pop culture and the seeming banality of the everyday into a site for serious reflection on the shadowy depths of the contemporary collective psyche, but Kelley does it eff ortlessly. He has a knack for reworking the defunct paraphernalia of cultural memory into unhinged, darkly comic revelations of the repressed erotics and neuroses bobbing under the surface of the mainstream, and his recent shows at Gagosian’s LA and London galleries and Kunstmuseen Krefeld were no exception: delving into American pop lore, Superman-inspired recreations of the Man of Steel’s home city of Kandor – drawn from the many reinterpretations of it found in decades of old comics – played on infantile nostalgia and distorted memories, showing that Kelley’s brand of anarchic psychoanalysis still has the power to delight and disturb.