The orientation allowed viewers to look down at the drains, but not into them this detail added an element of mystery to a work whose incongruous surfaces and collision of reality and illusion were already inflected by Surrealism. While furniture, clothing, and car parts are general signifiers both of daily life and the relationship between the body and the surrounding world, Kelly uses the formal and phenomenological properties of her materials to evoke what is unseen or only glimpsed: recesses, missing parts, implied but inaccessible interiors.įor “Front Door Floral Sheet” (2019), in her 2019 Chapter NY show, Kelly carved a recess in a car door, laid flat on the floor, and filled it with a plaster cast of two tiled drains. The title is a kind of punchline commenting on the readymade as a commodity simply rerouted from one function to another, but the chairs and surface pattern allude to a more intimate and more unsettling experience, of a domestic sphere that is closed to the viewer. The “bench” is rendered non-functional by its shape. The sculpture is composed of child-sized plastic chairs arranged in a ring formation and melded into a single entity, its surface covered in a tile or brick pattern made of plaster and colored pencil. “Untitled (small circular bench)” (2017) is emblematic. Installation view of Ann Greene Kelly, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, February 16–J(photo by Jeff McLane/ICA LA) Furniture intrigues Kelly because it conforms to the body at the same time, the implied body is often excluded by furniture that has been estranged from its function and seemingly evolved into its own elemental anatomy. The objects to which she repeatedly returns - folding or plastic chairs, mattresses, car doors and tires - reflect basic biological and social needs: to sit, to sleep, to get from one place to another. 2020 at the Hammer Museum and Huntington Art Museum. In 2019 she had a second solo show at Chapter NY and her first at Michael Benevento in Los Angeles this spring her sculptures and drawings are featured in a solo show at the ICA in LA and later in 2020 her work will be seen in Made in L.A. Kelly’s work has gained deserved attention in recent years. In Kelly’s sculptures, manmade objects morph into new or composite forms that seem to verge on organic. In Murray’s “ Jazz” (2001), for instance, a mug cracked in two is brought - painfully or ecstatically - to a state of sentience by its fragmentation. Yet Murray’s paintings share with Kelly’s work a dual emphasis, on the formal and narrative possibilities of familiar objects. Over the past decade, the New York-born, Los Angeles-based artist has produced a body of semi-abstract sculpture that acknowledges its precedents but carries them in a direction that is all the artist’s own. Despite some formal and thematic affinities, Kelly’s work is distinct from that of any of these artists. Murray is an unexpected reference: Kelly’s sculptures - in which she manipulates essential everyday objects into novel forms - are more often likened to works by Robert Gober and Franz West, sculptors who, respectively, unsettle the quotidian and revivify the cheap or disposable. The mug would be a new feature, inspired, she said, by paintings of coffee cups by Elizabeth Murray. She was thinking about integrating one into a sculpture in progress composed of car tires and a metal folding chair, both of which are common elements in her work. On a recent visit to Ann Greene Kelly’s Los Angeles studio, she showed me a selection of plastic mugs in various sizes and colors, at least one comically oversized. Ann Greene Kelly, “Front Door Floral Sheet” (2019), car door, plaster, colored pencil, 14 × 46 × 40 1/2 inches (image courtesy the artist and Chapter NY, New York, photo by Dario Lasagni)
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