# Mary Kelly in Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than The Real Thing

URL: https://vielmetter.com/exhibitions/whitney-biennial-2024-even-better-than-the-real-thing-mary-kelly/
March 20 — August 11, 2024 · Whitney Museum of American Art · Artists: Mary Kelly

**Member Previews:**March 14 – 18, 2024
 **Open to the Public:** March 20, 2024

Mary Kelly premieres a new, multi-paneled work entitled *Lacunae* (2023) in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, *Even Better Than the Real Thing*, curated by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, and Meg Onli, Curator at Large, with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes. Opening March 20, 2024, the Whitney Biennial features 71 artists and collectives and explores the fluidity of identity and form, historic and current land stewardship, and concepts of embodiment.

In a series of intimate collages, Kelly has combined her personal calendars with drawings in ash on vellum. Her age juxtaposed with those of deceased friends suggests an imaginary countdown, replayed as the gaps accumulate and the activity of real-time fades. The work evokes an incremental sense of loss that shapes the subjectivity of late life, but is often unacknowledged, or naturalized as the “normal course of things,” and remains outside of representation, unlike the experiences of loss during the AIDS epidemic or the Covid pandemic, which have found forms of expression in a broader cultural context.

*Lacunae* is the first part of an extended project in which Kelly has returned to the close-up, autobiographical narrative, and found materials, because, like *Post-Partum Document* (1973-79), the field of inquiry is defined by quotidian events. At the same time, the new work acts as a bookend to the documentation of her passage as a witness to the evolving politics of a generation of feminists.