JONH KELLY: 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.

January 9 – February 21, 2026

In 2006, 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.

In the process, Kelly points the viewer to examine lives lived fully despite the hazards of estrangement, loneliness, and death, and consequently takes on the risk for a promise of understanding and reprieve.

In the artist’s words, “My works flow out of a desire to embody a particular challenge or event, whether from imagination, actual persons’ reality, or personal history: life imagined, life considered, life experienced.” In this way, Kelly uses art to invite his audience into his illustrated world, not as witnesses, but as participants in the quest for consequence and acceptance.

Accompanying the larger-than-life installation is a video presentation that mirrors the chronology of the memoir, seeing Kelly utilize his command of voice, movement, and physical transformation to expound on his constructed reality. The artist has also transposed several panels from the memoir into gorgeously rendered oil on wood compositions, as evidenced by Self-portrait with Trapeze, 2025, providing the viewer with another channel for experiencing Kelly’s touching synthesis of Italian art history, forms of self-preservation, and modes of resilience.