Mike Kelley
Master Dik, from Pansy Metal/Clovered Hoof
1989
€7750,00
Screenprint on silk
134,62 x 96,52 cm
Edition of 40 copies, signed and numbered by the artist
Op voorraad
over dit werk
Mike Kelley’s Pansy Metal/Clovered Hoof (1989) is a series of twelve oversized silk banners. The imagery resembles crude, provocative doodles — the kind scribbled in the margins of school notebooks, carved into desks, or scrawled on bathroom walls. But here, they’re blown up to the scale of gymnasium banners, as if the school’s outsiders had claimed the walls to proudly display the symbols of their counterculture. Rendered in a limited palette of black, white, red, and green, the banners stage a chaotic mash-up of Irish clovers, male genitalia, skulls, and grotesque portraiture.
One banner features a swastika, stripped of its menace by the absurd addition of clovers and phalluses to its tips — a clear act of ridicule. The series also parodies the visual tropes of heavy metal culture, with its fascination for skulls, devils, and dark symbolism. Kelley takes particular aim at Motörhead, mocking their dramatic use of umlauts by inserting one into his own name on a banner featuring a devil’s mask. At once juvenile, pointed, and theatrical, Pansy Metal/Clovered Hoof confronts the rituals and aesthetics of subculture with both affection and biting critique.
Pansy Metal/Clovered Hoof was originally conceived of as costumes for a performance in collaboration with choreographer / dancer Anita Pace and performed on a fashion show-style ramp to music by Motörhead. The performance was later restaged in 2012 at the openings of the Mike Kelley retrospective at MOCA, Los Angeles; MoMA PS1, New York; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Mike Kelley’s Master Dik is currently on view as part of On Becoming – our first show at Cabanon.
Please note this is a historic artwork. There are some small remarks concerning its condition. Request a condition report here.
over Mike Kelley
Mike Kelley is considered one of the most significant artists of the last 30 years and has worked together with numerous artists, such as Paul McCarthy, Jim Shaw and Tony Oursler. Kelley’s artistic practice is extremely diverse in medium and includes performances, installations, drawings, and sculptures (made of multiple materials and non-art objects, including stuffed animals).
His work is characterised by the way it integrates popular culture (nourished by philosophy, literature and art history) and by the exuberance of his visual style which is opposed to aesthetics of minimalism as well as to the neutrality of pop art and abstraction. In this way Kelley challenges traditional attitudes towards topics such as religion, sexuality, gender, education and even art history. It is this constant challenge and variety of influences that makes Kelley’s works -sometimes subtly, uncannily or even bluntly- so intriguing and powerful.
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