Mike Kelley is dead; likely suicide

Gagosian Gallery has confirmed that Mike Kelley, one of the true giants of his generation, is dead. ARTINFO is reporting it was a suicide, but this is so far unconfirmed. He was 58. 

It's hard to know where to begin with Kelley's ouevre, which spanned the gamut from the viscerally grotesque to the more-than-occaisionally beautiful. In reviewing his 1993 survey at the Whitney, Times critic Roberta Smith observed that Kelly's work was "eccentric, obsessive, completely uninhibited and mind-bogglingly diverse."

That being the case, there's not much time or space for me to touch on it here, other than to say that Kelley's devotion to punk rock provided me with one of my earliest entry points to the visceral confusions of the contemporary art world. A native Detroiter, he was a co-founding member of the art-punk band Destroy All Monsters; his design of the aptly-named 1992 Sonic Youth album Dirty, with images of stuffed animals being defiled in the most gleefully dark ways, remains a signpost in my formative understanding of art in general. Sorry to see him gone so soon.