New details — and an outpouring of praise from the art world — have emerged surrounding the death of legendary artist Mike Kelley, who was found in his South Pasadena, California home on Tuesday. The loss has been widely reported to be a suicide. The Associated Press reported that a worried family friend went to Kelley's home Tuesday and found him, though the police will not confirm the cause of death until an autopsy is completed Thursday. The friend told the AP that Kelley had been depressed after a recent breakup with his girlfriend, but no note was found in his home. The tragedy has sparked a flood of remembrances by Kelley's art world colleagues and friends.
Most notably, a group of artist colleagues and friends — including artists Paul McCarthy and Jim Shaw as well as collector Kourosh Larizadeh — sent out a joint email remembering Kelley. It was published in part by the LA Times's Culture Monster blog:
Our dear friend the artist Mike Kelley (born 1954 in Detroit) has passed away. Unstintingly passionate, habitually outspoken and immeasurably creative in every genre or material with which he took up — and that was most of them, from performance and sculpture to painting, installation and video, from experimental music to writing in a thousand voices — Mike was an irresistible force in contemporary art. For Mike history existed only to be reconstructed, memory was selective, faulty and willful and life itself vibrant but often dysfunctional. We can hear him disagreeing with us. We cannot believe he is gone. But we know his legacy will continue to touch and challenge anyone who crosses its path. We will miss him. We will keep him with us.
Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at LACMA, spoke to the Associated Press about Kelley's influence. "He was extremely intense, very serious, phenomenally well read. He would go very deep into his subjects, a real artist scholar but with a real passion for whatever he was investigating," Barron said. "His works often violated notions of so called good taste and blurred the boundaries between art, music and popular culture."
The Los Angeles Times has the most comprehensive roundup of critics and colleagues talking about the artist's work, with colleagues like Tony Oursler and John Waters weighing in. LACMA chief curator Paul Schimmel told the LAT: "L.A. would not have become a great international capital of contemporary art without Mike Kelley. Of all the artists in the 1980s, he was the one who really broke out and established a new and complex identity for his generation."