A FRIEND GAVE ME A BOOK

P·P·O·W is pleased to present A FRIEND GAVE ME A BOOK, John Kelly's first exhibition with the gallery, and the inaugural display of the artist's epic 182-panel hand-illustrated graphic memoir. Shown here alongside a multi-channel video performance of the same name — that both incorporates and responds to the visual autobiography — this work simultaneously represents the culmination of more than a decade of artistic creation, as well as a continuation of Kelly's radical adoption of various historical and pop cultural personae as vehicles for exploring ideas of gender, truth, death, and the pursuit for creative identity. Kelly came up in New York's burgeoning downtown performance scene of the early-1980s. In 2004, while preparing for a performance inspired by his obsession with the seventeenth-century Italian painter Caravaggio, Kelly broke his neck after falling from a trapeze. A FRIEND GAVE ME A BOOK, 2016-2025, is the artist's retelling of this incident, interweaving his own personal trauma through narrative and poetry. Kelly uses art to invite his audience into his illustrated world, not as witnesses, but as participants in the quest for consequence and acceptance.