Rene Magritte, La clef des songes, 1930. Private Collection, Vienna, Photograph Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY, Artwork © 2017 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
out by the artist as one of the most important works of the series when he highlighted it “as a concretization of the Educational Complex” (Mike Kelley, quoted in Educational Complex Onwards 1995—2008, exh. cat., WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, 2008, p. 12). Since its debut, Entry Way (Genealogical Chart) has been featured in many of the artist’s most signifcant exhibitions, including his frst major European mid-career retrospective in 1997 and his major touring retrospective that opened at MoMA PS1, New York, in 2012.
In the course of a multi-disciplinary career that spanned 35 years and was brought to an end by an untimely death in 2012, Kelley drew on a staggering array of stylistic genres, media and disciplines to interrogate systems of cultural identity, power, production and belief. Emerging on the Los Angeles art scene in the late 1970s with a series of pioneering performances and his legendary “anti-rock” band Destroy All Monsters, Kelley was a trailblazing art-world anarchist who imploded the notion of high art from within by ingeniously combining concepts from art theory, psychology, and philosophy with craf art, popular culture, juvenile puns and the abject materials of the American lower middle-class. Following Kelley’s breakthrough series of found sculptures, Half a Man, 19871993, the works exhibited in towards a utopian arts complex characterize the increased physical scale and conceptual scope that Kelley began utilizing in the early to mid-1990s and which would culminate in such epic installations as Day Is Done, 2005, and the posthumously completed Mobile Homestead, 2006-2013. Building on his earlier incorporation of materials related to his self-proclaimed lower-middle class background, towards a utopian arts complex heralded Kelley’s frst large-scale conceptual engagement with his own biography. The exhibition took Repressed Memory Syndrome as a point of departure, a now widely contested psychological theory that maintained the existence of repressed memories related to severe trauma, especially those of child sexual
Mike Kelley Metro Pictures installation view of Towards a Utopian Arts Complex, New York, 1995 (present lot illustrated). Photograph courtesy of Metro Pictures, Artwork © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts
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