I clearly remember my first direct contact with Mike Kelley's works. It was in an occasion which I had the opportunity to attend an exhibition about the little known and very complete collection Herbert, featuring contemporary masters such as Hans Hofmann, Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman, or important sculptors as Eduardo Chillida or Sol Lewitt. There, in one of the last rooms, I suddenly faced the Memory Ware Flat #18 (2001). The spectacularity of the work was so that it surpassed every other work in the room: the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pieces of imitation jewellery, metal plates, keys, key rings, and other daily objects supposed an exciting challenge for the spectator, taking it to an impossible debate between the possibility of facing the work in its totality, or in the partial contemplation of the infinity of daily and easily recognizable objects. It was frankly peculiar that the union between cheap, out-fashioned earrings, a few plastic flowers, pins of almost every pop band of the 80s, and a funny Flubber pic could suppose a comparable to a complete set of Quianlong dishes.

It was not easy to me to follow Kelley's artistic evolution. His works, that begin to be abundant in the American Museums, are really hard to find in the European ones. Only the Tate Gallery of London seems to have a complete representation of the series "The Uncanny", and the Centre Pompidou of Paris projected at the beginning of this year a series of videos by the American artist in the cycle "Vidéo et après".

The artistic story of Mike Kelley (Wayne, Detroit, 1954) curiously begins in the music world. In fact, Kelley forged the beginnings of his artistic career in the stormy American musical scene of the early 70s, being member of the band Destroy All Monsters . Even after being transferred to Los Angeles , in 1978, Kelley keeps collaborating with the music world, being responsible of the design of the cover and booklet of the album Dirty (1992) by Sonic Youth.

Focusing on the visual Arts, Kelley is one of those unclassifiable artists whose work shows clear influences of the popular culture, which is not strange in an artist formed in the suburban Detroit scene. This influences results in works that are certainly disturbing - from the large, multicolour installations to those strange animal figures or human body fragments- but, however, the rich polychromy used by Kelley gives them an undeniable and strange attractive.