Michael John Kelly (b. 1975, Provo, Utah, USA) is a Los Angeles-based painter whose work occupies a singular territory between the digital and the analogue, where image-making is simultaneously an act of construction and destruction.
Trained in painting at Brigham Young University and at UCLA, where he received his MFA, Kelly builds his compositions by first generating imagery on an iPad before weaving printed sketches and found images into layered paint on canvas, collapsing the boundary between digital drawing and classical abstraction. His visual language draws freely from science fiction, anime, hip-hop, punk rock, graffiti, and the history of abstract expressionism, producing chaotic and emotionally charged tableaus in which abstracted personalities seem to inhabit parallel planes. Rather than translating digital painting into analogue form, Kelly seeks to make both media experientially intertwined, so that the question of where one ends and the other begins remains productively unresolved.
His work is held in notable private collections including the Susan and Michael Hort Collection (New York), the Gayle and Stanley Hollander Collection (Los Angeles), and the Carole Server and Oliver Frankel Collection (New York). Michael John Kelly has presented his work at 68projects by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin on multiple occasions, most recently in the anniversary group exhibition Berlin on my Mind (2024).
Michael John Kelly (b. 1975, Provo, Utah, USA) grew up in Huntington Beach, California, and lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied painting at Brigham Young University in Provo and received his MFA in painting from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His practice sits at the intersection of digital image-making and analogue painting, combining painting, print, photography, drawing, and collage into a body of work that refuses to settle into any single medium or register.
Kelly's paintings are built through a distinctive process: compositions originate as digital works on an iPad, and printed elements are then woven into layered paint on canvas, so that digital and analogue modes of image-making become structurally inseparable. His visual sources are deliberately wide-ranging, drawing on science fiction, anime, hip-hop, punk rock, graffiti, cartoons, new media, and the history of abstract expressionism, without privileging any one reference over another. The result is work that conjures emotional realities and abstracted personalities inhabiting parallel planes, dense with cultural memory yet resistant to straightforward reading. The mask, an archetype of comic fiction and a recurring motif in the history of modernism, appears throughout his work as a figure of concealment, transformation, and identity.
Kelly's work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally, with presentations in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Basel, London, Dusseldorf, Berlin, and Istanbul. His work is held in significant private collections including the Susan and Michael Hort Collection (New York), the Gayle and Stanley Hollander Collection (Los Angeles), and the Carole Server and Oliver Frankel Collection (New York).
Michael John Kelly's relationship with KORNFELD Galerie Berlin spans more than a decade. In 2016, he presented Language, his first solo exhibition in Europe, at 68projects as the second part of the Berlin-L.A. trilogy. In 2019, Kelly returned to Berlin as a Fellow of Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House e. V., spending two months in residence at 68projects. The residency gave rise to a duo exhibition with Rachel Eulena Williams, presented at 68projects from 27 June to 29 August 2019, in which Kelly showed large-scale paintings and drawings produced during his Berlin stay. For the residency, he arrived with more than forty digital paintings on paper, which he gradually tore apart over the course of his time in Berlin, treating destruction as an integral part of the creative process. He also participated in the group exhibition MONA at 68projects (2015) and appeared in Berlin on my Mind. Celebrating 10 Years of Artistic Residency at 68projects by KORNFELD (21 June to 24 August 2024). His practice continues to test the limits of what painting can absorb, hold, and transform in an era of proliferating digital images.
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Berlin on my Mind. Celebrating 10 Years of Artistic Residency at 68projects by KORNFELD – Groupshow
21 Jun - 24 Aug 2024 68projectsARTISTSRead more
Dawit Abebe, Olasunkanmi Akomolehin, Cristina BanBan, Yevgeniya Baras, William Bradley, Giorgio Celin, Chris Engman, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, Seong Joon Hong, Chris Hood, Michael John Kelly, Alexander Kroll, Doron Langberg, Sandeep Mukherjee, Jennifer Packer, Adrianne Rubenstein, Kyungmi Shin, Levan Songulashvili, Panos Tsagaris, Rachel Eulena Williams & Liat Yossifor
INFORMATION
On 21 June, we will showcase 21 works by the 21 artists who have been our guests as artists-in-residence over the past 10 years of 68projects by KORNFELD – with ‘Berlin on My Mind’. We are celebrating our 10 years with 68projects by KORNFELD and the 10 years of our artist-in-residence program, but also our future, which we hope to keep creating in Berlin. In Berlin, international artists look for new perspectives, a place where ideas mingle
Opening: June 21 2024, 6 pm
Exhibition: June 21 – August 24 2024, Tue – Sat, 11 am – 6 pm
68projects by KORNFELD, Fasanenstr. 68, 10719 Berlin -
Michael John Kelly & Rachel Eulena Williams
27 Jun - 29 Aug 2019 68projects68projects is pleased to present a duo presentation featuring Los Angeles artist Michael John Kelly and New York artist Rachel Eulena Williams. Kelly's large-scale paintings and drawings as well as William's object-like works were all created during their stay in Berlin as part of our residency program. The exhibition provides an insight into the artists' practices and a unique reflection on the influences their stay in Berlin had on their work.Read more -
Michael John Kelly – Language. Berlin - L.A Trilogie II
30 Jan - 5 Mar 2016 68projectsThis exhibition: “Language”, by painter Michael John Kelly, is the second part of our Berlin-L.A. trilogy and the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe. Michael John Kelly’s work is characterized by many different influences and “languages”: his images combine painting, print, photography, drawing and collage. In terms of content, they contain elements from new media and abstract expressionism, graffiti and cartoons, and science fiction movies and the world of hip-hop and punk rock. Kelly, however, continually emphasizes the equal importance of all of his materials and sources of inspiration.Read more -
MONA – Groupshow
12 Sep - 21 Nov 2015 68projectsTom Anholt, Wolfgang Beltracchi, Matt Chambers, Tomory Dodge, Bertram Hasenauer, Iris Yirei Hu, Leiko Ikemura, Elmira Iravanizad, Michael John Kelly, Genti Korini, Evan Nesbit, Jon Pestoni, Les Rogers, Ena Swansea and Gloria von Thurn und TaxisRead more
In our most ambitious effort to date, 68projects commissioned new work by international contemporary artists by providing each participating artist with a similar wood panel used by da Vinci. They cut to the exact dimensions of the painting. With no requirement to reference da Vinci or portraiture or even to keep the wood in one piece, each artist was asked to make a work in their style and manner, one that would give beloved Mona a partner-in-crime…a partner-in-time.
