This week: a huge survey of the work of the late linchpin of the Los Angeles contemporary scene Mike Kelley has arrived at Tate Modern in London. We speak to its co-curator Catherine Wood about this enormously influential artist and his visceral and absurd response to popular culture and folk traditions of the US.
Jim McHugh’s portrait of Mike Kelley as The Banana Man (around 1983), with Kelley’s Last Tool in Use (1977) in the background
Photo: Jim McHugh
A major show of Indian art made between 1975 and 1998, a pivotal period of political, social and economic change in the country, opened this week at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. Shanay Jhaveri, a former curator of international art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York who is now head of visual arts at the Barbican, leads us in a tour of show.
Bhupen Khakhar, Grey Blanket, 1998, on view on The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998 at the Barbican Centre, London
© Estate of Bhupen Khakhar
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Raoul Dufy’s Thirty Years or La Vie en Rose (1931), a painting made originally for the 30th anniversary of a gallery in Paris, that was owned by the pioneering woman gallerist Berthe Weill. She is the subject of an exhibition at the Grey Art Museum at New York University, which will tour next year to Montreal and Paris.
Raoul Dufy, 30 ans ou la Vie en rose (Thirty years or la Vie en rose) (1931)
© 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: CC0 Paris Musées / Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Lynn Gumpert, the co-curator of the show and director of the Grey Art Museum, tells us about the painting, the artist and the dealer.
- Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit, Tate Modern, London, until 9 March 2025; Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 12 April-15 September 2025.
- The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 5 October-5 January 2025
- You can hear an in-depth interview with Nalini Malani on A brush with…, that’s the episode from 21 February this year
- Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde, Grey Art Museum, New York, until 1 March; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 10 May-7 September 2025; Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, 8 October 2025-25 January 2026
