Mike Kelley

Vice Anglais

4 February – 17 April 2025

Over the course of his four decade career, Mike Kelley (1954 – 2012) addressed the relation of establishment culture to counterculture. He shed light on social rituals and subcultures, whilst simultaneously parodying the imposition of institutionalized power and instruction.

With his Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (EAPR) series (2000 – 2011), Mike Kelley set out to make 365 videos and video installations, one for each day of the year. Often accompanied by partial or full stage sets and sculptural components, these ‘video narratives’ restaged found photographs of extracurricular activities culled from Kelley’s collection of high school yearbooks. The EAPR series is closely related to Kelley’s seminal project ‘Educational Complex’ (1995), an architectural model of all the educational institutions he attended in which he left out the parts he could not remember, exploring the pervasiveness of repressed memory syndrome. The EAPR series came to an early end with ‘Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 (Vice Anglais)’ (2011), one of the last videos Kelley ever made.

The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London will focus on this final EAPR through related works, including a series of large-scale paintings of the cast of transgressive characters in ‘Vice Anglais,’ a lightbox still of a scene from the video and sculptures made using props from his videos. ‘Vice Anglais’ is rooted specifically in Kelley’s interest in the Romantic movement of the late 18th- and early 19th-Centuries, characterized as the original counterculture. In addition, the video evokes the legacies of Romanticism in the later 19th-Century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England, as well as the resonances of this specifically British counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. A special screening of the video will be held during the exhibition run.

This exhibition will run concurrently with the major survey Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit’ at Tate Modern in London, UK, which is on view until Sunday 9 March 2025.

Mike Kelley

Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 (Vice Anglais)

2011

About the Artist

Mike Kelley

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.

Starting out in the late 1970s, Kelley became known for performance and installation based works; he came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of common craft materials and stuffed animals. His work later widened in scope and physical scale, exemplified by ‘Educational Complex’ (1995), the ‘Kandors’ series (1999 – 2011), ‘Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction’ series (2000 – 2011), and the posthumously completed public work ‘Mobile Homestead’ (2006 – 2013). These projects invoked a vast range of media and forms, illustrating the artist's versatility and underscored a number of Kelley's recurrent themes, such as repressed memory, sexuality, adolescence, class, and Americana, which were central to his artistic praxis. Throughout his career, Kelley also worked on curatorial projects, collaborated with many artists and musicians, and produced a formidable body of critical and creative writing.