Hauser & Wirth will present an exhibition dedicated to Mike Kelley's lesser-known early works on paper at its New York 18th Street gallery, opening on 12 November. Titled 'Mike Kelley. Jerry Meandering', the show is organised in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, and several of the early works it brings together have never been exhibited before.

The exhibition takes its title from Kelley's 1976 work Jerry Meandering, also known in full as Jerry Meandering slash Mr. and Mrs. Ford at Play, an etching and aquatint from the artist's student years. That early moment is the show's focus: rather than the large-scale installations and videos for which Kelley later became widely known, it looks at works on paper, including collages made across the years from 1974 to 2001, as a window onto a practice that was already subversive in its approach to images, language and everyday culture.

Kelley, who was born in Detroit in 1954 and died in Los Angeles in 2012, built a career across four decades that moved between drawing, painting, sculpture, video, performance, music and critical writing. His work drew on both high and low culture, mixing the sacred and the profane, the comic and the tragic, to question aesthetic convention and expose the tensions of American vernacular life. The early works on paper show that sensibility taking shape, in small, handmade forms made long before his major installations.

For visitors, the exhibition offers a rarer view of Kelley: not the provocateur of large public works, but a young artist working things out on paper, collecting, cutting and redrawing the images around him. By returning to material that has stayed largely out of sight, the show argues that the roots of Kelley's later practice are already visible in these early sheets, and that his subversive streak was present from the start.