We round up the reviews for this retrospective of the American artist’s work.
The Guardian: **** “Kelley plays with popular culture and the abject, his deft, dramatic sense (how much to conceal, how much to reveal) and knowing how far to go – then going further – and his painful evocations of his own past add up to something more than the autobiographical. His art may be quintessentially American, but is also about what is shared more generally.”
Time Out: **** “Chaos, noise, torture, lies, laughter and trauma. Mike Kelley’s show at Tate Modern is not an easy or comfortable place to be, and that’s how he would’ve wanted it.”
The FT: “Pop Art, crisp and fresh, created iconic images; Kelley, murky and insidious, doesn’t. He used to ponder ghosts and spirits, believing that the former soon vanished, the latter hung around. In part his work already looks dated, forgettable, even parochial, but its subversive spirit lives.”
Evening Standard: ** ” I felt bewildered throughout; it’s not always clear where one body of work ends and the next begins, and good lord, the noise. The relentless blast of dinks and shrieks and yells and clangs and music from various video and audio works is harrowingly inescapable from start to finish.”
The Telegraph: **** ” This disorientating, impish exhibition of the late American artist’s work brims with anarchic possibility and topsy-turvy merriment.”
The Observer: ** “If you want to be in the grungy fug of his clever-boy brain, you will love this show; and, sure enough, Kelley is catnip to fellow artists, male admirers and people who can’t abide the sanctimonious art trade. But he is no Antonin Artaud, or Iggy Pop or Paul McCarthy. The true anarchic freak-out just never arrives.”
City AM: “None of this was designed to be taken entirely seriously: “The viewer must at least suspect that I am not the thing I claim to be,” reads one cryptic note. His contemporaries described his art as being like a classroom lecture stripped of its meaning.”
The exhibition is on display until the 9th March 2025.