Artwork details - EVN Sammlung

Color and Form (I)
Mike Kelley

C-print
edition 2/4
125 × 214 cm (framed)
1999

Acquisition 1999
Inv. No. 0067a

The two large format colour photos are the result of Mike Kelly’s comprehensive engagement with biomorphic landscapes, grottoes and similar things – in short, with “formlessness”. Along with a reconstruction of a Chinese wishing well in Los Angeles the work group also contains installations and documentation of “formless” artificial landscapes in zoos and theme parks.

The photos show water containers at the Belle Isle Aquarium in the Detroit River. Kelley is not interested in fish and ocean life, but in the flora on the bottom of the aquarium’s pools. The bizarre landscape is lit with powerful coloured spotlights and photographed in and out of focus. As is stated in the title, the artist is concerned with colours and forms – the conventions of representation of the amorphous, prosaic structures – the abstraction from nature or, alternatively, with its imitations and “displacement” as art.

Brigitte Huck, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)