Contemporary artist Mike Kelley was born on October 27, 1954, in Detroit, USA. He passed away on January 31, 2012.
After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1976, he went on to study at the California Institute of the Arts. While performing as a member of the noise band "Destroy All Monsters," he devoted himself to creating contemporary art, including sculpture, painting, performance, and installation. Many of his works focused on Freud's "repression syndrome," focusing on the suppressed chaos hidden within American pop culture.
In the 1980s, Kelley began creating his "Half a Man" series using worn stuffed toys. These works, which are somewhat eerie, sinister, and sometimes terrifying, attracted the attention of many art fans. In 1988, he produced "A Love That Can't Be Repaid," a canvas-filled collage of stuffed animals and fabrics. This work would later become one of his most well-known works.

These activities were recognized, and he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2003 and the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2006. He is highly regarded as one of America's leading contemporary artists, but was found dead at his home in 2012.

In 2014, a major Mike Kelley retrospective, "The Confluence of Pop Culture and Counterculture," was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA.