CHELSEA — The late artist Mike Kelley's depictions of the Man of Steel's long-lost intergalactic home city are coming to a Chelsea gallery in September.
A collection of Kelley's replications of Superman's city of Kandor from his home planet of Krypton — which the superhero kept in a bottle in his "Fortress of Solitude," according to comic book lore — will be on display at Hauser & Wirth gallery beginning Sept. 10.
"As Kelley once explained, Kandor functions for Superman as 'a perpetual reminder of his inability to escape the past, and his alienated relationship to his present world,'" the gallery said in a press release.
Art world superhero Kelley, who died in 2012, built a series of reconstructions of the city, including a "cavernous installation" called the "Exploded Fortress of Solitude," according to Hauser & Wirth.
"Cast in resin, these miniature metropolises representing the city of Kandor create an optically dazzling spectacle rendered in a palette of refracted colors," the gallery said.
Kelley, a Detroit native, delved into the deeper world of common and imperfect objects like teddy bears and garbage.
"His art searches out dark and soiled places where defects, fault lines and inadequacies are obvious and routine, and where failure takes on the poignant, fragile, even heartbreaking beauty that accompanies any loss of self," L.A. Times critic Christopher Knight wrote of his work in 1994.
The show opens Sept. 10 at Hauser & Wirth, located at 511 West 18th St.
