_{Twinkling Coppers (from “Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile”), 1986
Acrylic on canvas with penny and string of multi-colored flashing electrical Christmas lights
60 x 60 x 3 3/8 inches (152.4 x 152.4 x 8.6 cm)}

Artist Mike Kelley died today. Story here.

Peter Frank, Associate Editor of Fabrik magazine and art critic for The Huffington Post, eulogized Kelley:

Mike Kelley was one of the less predictable, more original, and most committed talents of his — my — generation. His punk-driven suburban surrealism hit home, inspiring a distinctive discourse within, and helping to substantiate, the post-modernist trajectory. He was also notably devoted to and supportive of the community of artists. What a shame that the pain and isolation his art alternately bespeaks and thinly veils ultimately engulfed him.

Gallerist Jack Rutberg said:

Mike Kelley’s [death] is tragic. I met the fellow when he visited the gallery, and was impressed by him. He was hugely impressed with the work of Hans [Burkhardt], and brought one of his fans in a few years ago to introduce her to great painting. I’m always appreciative of breadth of appreciation and consideration — especially when it falls outside one’s own aesthetic engagement. 

_{Photo © Douglas M. Parker Studio
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery}

I chatted on the phone with Schlesinger hours before his opening: “I grew up in the San Fernando Valley,” he said as an opener. “I attended Toluca Lake elementary school, and then my family moved to Encino. That was the late ’50s, and it was all pretty rural. I always did art, I started with private art lessons at ten. I was always doing extracurricular classes.

“My parents liked art. They took me to shows. They encouraged it. My Dad used to drive me to Saturday art courses [over the hill] when I was in junior high school.

“I attended UC Santa Cruz the year they opened it. I transferred to UCLA and studied with Diebenkorn, Llyn Folkes, Bill Brice and Ruba (?). There was an atmosphere to being in the L.A. art circle. I used to go to the La Cienega galleries.

“But I only wanted to get away. The Valley was so isolated. I always wanted to be a romantic expatriate artist. So I attended the Slade School [of Art in London]. I was in London for a decade, 1968-78, then I came back to New York where I’ve been ever since.”

The show features 25 ceramic sculpture works, awesome, weighty things that look lugged from ancient Greece, but were made in Schlesinger’s Brooklyn studio. Amidst the vessels and urns, a set of Schlesinger’s clear-eyed photographs of his European adventures. Now hanging on Melrose Avenue, they normally live in the artist’s 2003 memoir, “Checkered Past: A Visual Diary of the 60′s and 70′s.”

_{arts·meme is honored to feature photography by alex berliner.}

Peter Schlesinger | Duke & Duke Gallery | 8527 Melrose Avenue | thru March 16