MIKE KELLEY: VICE ANGLAIS

Hauser & Wirth London is pleased to present ‘Vice Anglais’, Mike Kelley’s solo exhibition.

February 4 – April 17, 2025

In collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, this exhibition unveils a series of never-before exhibited paintings depicting Kelley’s cast of transgressive characters. The EAPR are a series of ‘video narratives’ that were often accompanied by sculptural installations of partial or full stage sets.

Kelley drew his inspiration for each video from his large collection of found archival images and high school yearbooks depicting amateur extracurricular activities that have a strong relationship to popular and folk entertainments. Kelley’s work can be viewed as drawing on a carnivalesque or subversive spirit at odds with the institutional nature and officialdom of the education system. In light of this, these EAPR works can be seen as evoking concepts that belong to counterculture, including ideas of ‘deschooling society.’

A precursor to the EAPR series is Mike Kelley’s ‘Educational Complex’ (1995), which comprises an architectural model of all the educational institutions he attended rendered from memory, with forgotten spaces left empty. Exploring the public fascination with repressed memory syndrome, the inability to recall traumatic events, Kelley produced his EAPR videos to fill in these blank spaces.

‘Vice Anglais’ centres on six parodic characters, M’Lord, Pile Driver, Skank, Poof and Josette, alongside an allegorical personification, Golden Rod. These characters appear individually in the costume paintings for the video, drawing on the tradition of theatrical character and costume studies. In the video, these protagonists are depicted in a series of scenarios that explore power relations and masculinity and suggest rather than show sexual violence.