Curated by Douglas Fogle

NEON presents the first monographic exhibition of Mike Kelley in Athens, Fortress of Solitude.

Superman had a problem. He couldn’t go home. Although endowed with paranormal abilities such as super strength, the power of flight, and invulnerability to any natural or man-made force, he was nonetheless defenseless against homesickness. He found himself exiled on Earth, an extraterrestrial unable to phone home because his planet, Krypton, had been blown to bits by an apocalyptic cataclysm. In fact fragments of his old home, known as Kryptonite, would reduce him to a level of childlike helplessness. In Superman’s world, home was a killer.

The Los Angeles-based artist Mike Kelley (b. 1954, d. 2012) spent his career trying to get home. Like Superman he came to realize that it was an impossible quest. Looking at the play between memory and forgetfulness the exhibition Mike Kelley: Fortress of Solitude brings together a range of key works from across the artist’s career in order to reflect on the uncanny condition of psychological homelessness in the contemporary world. Whether using found stuffed animals as emotional effigies of long lost memories of childhood, or evoking the psychic homelessness of Superman in the form of a reconstructive exploration of the superhero’s shrunken and inaccessible home city of Kandor that he kept in his Fortress of Solitude, Kelley reminds us that no matter how hard we try, we can’t go home.