MoMA Acquires Significant Mike Kelley Stuffed Animal Installation for $4.15 million

Artist Mike Kelley’s stuffed-animal installation “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites” at the Perry Rubenstein Gallery in Los Angeles last fall.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art has purchased the late Mike Kelley’s large scale stuffed animal installation Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, according to the Wall Street Journal, for $4.15 million. The work was sold at Philips in 2006 to Peter Brant for $2.7 million and more recently was on the market for $5.5 million.   Kelley was a multi-talented Los Angeles-based artist currently the subject of a retrospective that last opened December at Amsterdam’s newly renovated Stedelijk Museum and will open at Paris’s Centre Pompidou in May before continuing on to PS1 in New York and finally LA MOCA.  His life, final days and suicide are covered in the compelling and beautifully written Wall Street Journal Magazine article The Escape Artist.

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987, found handmade stuffed animals and afghans on canvas, dried corn, wax candles on wood, metal base, 2 parts, 96 x 127 x 5 in.; 52 x 23 x 23 in. Installation view Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles; Photo by Douglas M. Parker; Courtesy Mike Kelley Foundation of Arts ©Estate of Mike Kelley.