John Kelly: A FRIEND GAVE ME A BOOK
P·P·O·W | 392 Broadway, New York
January 9 – February 21, 2026
A FRIEND GAVE ME A BOOK, John Kelly’s exhibition at P·P·O·W, turns the white cube into a nervous, run-on sentence viewers must circle to read. Extended friezes of small painted panels spread horizontally around the gallery walls at chest height. From a distance, the works cohere into a continuous band: part filmstrip, part medical chart, part memory palace built from thumbnails. Up close, that continuity fractures into quick cuts: landscapes, cropped bodies, diagrams, and blocks of lettering that flicker between declaration and signage.
Kelly’s paintings are a choreographic exercise in confounding a biography. Clustered paragraphs of two-row grids sometimes tighten the narrative, condensing meaning and deciphering keys in just a few panels, and other times loosen the intensity of one climax after another. Often, a panel finds its mirrored subject, correspondence, or answer across the room so that looking is always doubled by the awareness of a second sequence in peripheral vision. Kelly stages a charged trail that recollects every detail of his life/performance. The gallery becomes a sanctuary and exam room saturated in devotion and self-surveillance. Panels that read “YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE,” “ADMIT,” or “GROSS CLINIC” don’t merely caption the work; they name the spectator’s relation to Kelly’s autobiography, that his life lesson could equally be our mantra for living.
A handful of larger text-panels act like chapter headings: “HOME,” “FOCUS,” “THE ESCAPE ARTIST,” “CREDO CREDO,” “FAME,” and finally, “FINE.” Their bluntness is the point: these are public words pressed into private territory, appearing estranged. They are a reminder that when performing the story of the self, there is no homely comfort. Kelly is estranged from the raw materials of his past in this grand performance of self-narration, with each transformative life event becoming intake forms to fill and confession to make. Indeed, “FOCUS” lands as the voice of productivity. These words, read along theatrical yet mimetic scenes of ambivalent eroticism or violence, provide a deadpan portrait of visibility’s machinery: promise of transparency, simultaneous gatekeeping, and the thin membrane of reassurance that a fictionalized version of a life lived will get across.
A FRIEND GAVE ME A BOOK (2011–2025) complicates the biographical and the archival with a durational performance video that stages the hurt body as evidence to be historicized, examined, and mythologized. If the grid offers survival through naming and filing, the moving image returns what resists filing: longing, ritual, the uncanny persistence of bodily overflow.
The show’s final word—“FINE”—reads less as closure than as coping. Kelly doesn’t mock this mechanism, though; he lets “fine” be what it often is: a fragile utterance stretched over pressure, doing its best to hold.