The Austrian-born Pop artist Kiki Kogelnik has been something of a “secret” outside her native country until very recently, says the director of her New York-based foundation, Stephen Hepworth. But with the first solo exhibition of her work in London now open at Pace Gallery and a major touring survey on view at the Kunsthaus Zürich, she is unlikely to remain under the radar for much longer. Born in 1935, Kogelnik came of age in a devastated post-war Europe and was restless with the “desire to escape, to find a space where one can be free”, Hepworth says. From the arts academies of Vienna she travelled to Paris, where a fateful encounter with the Abstract Expressionist painter Sam Francis propelled her move to New York. Making the city her home in 1962, she plunged headlong into “the new direction” in painting, now known as Pop.

In the late Kiki Kogelnik’s paintings and sculptures, floating female silhouettes and celestial orbs have a bold billboard appeal and come in solid candy hues. Yet spend time with her flattened fragmented people and her vision of the future looks less than bright. This show focuses on space travel’s potential for freedom and alarm. From her outlines of people cut from smooth shiny vinyls to bodies adorned with kitschy love hearts, Kogelnik suggests that human depth risks being lost in a technologised world. The weekend’s special exhibition tour guides include top Polish artist Paulina Olowska, a Kogelnik fan whose work has also drawn on imagery from women’s magazines.

It probably came as no surprise to the locals, but in a recent European Commission report, Zürich was crowned most liveable city on the continent, with a satisfaction rate of 97 per cent. Personal finances, public transport, LGTBQ+ inclusivity, healthcare, air quality . . . Zürich topped the league for all of them — as it did for its cultural landscape. For while Zürich may be compact, it packs a punch on the arts and festivals front, with a depth and diversity matching that of much larger cities. The first Swiss retrospective dedicated to the late Austrian Pop artist and sculptor Kiki Kogelnik features 150 works created over four decades. Known for her experiments with collage and materials such as vinyl, Kogelnik powerfully — and playfully — examined the politics of gender and sexual identity, as well as ethical concerns about emerging technologies. Until July 14.

The major shifts that took shape in the 1960s—from the civil rights movement and rock and roll to the rise of mass consumerism and the sexual revolution—still echo in contemporary society and throughout the art world. A new show at France’s Pinault Collection explores not just the era’s creative upheaval, but what it represents to us today. “Forever Sixties: The Spirit of the Sixties in the Pinault Collection,” which marks the third edition of the annual arts and culture Exporama in Rennes, explores the decade’s resounding shifts in art history and beyond through 80 emblematic artworks—many of which have never been on public display. “What did the 1960s represent?” their release reads, citing “tension between conservatism and democratization, dominant culture and alternative countercultures, commercial conformism and dreams of escape.”

Kiki Kogelnik went to Vienna after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, fell into a male-dominated artistic milieu early on. She belonged to the extended circle of the so-called Stephans Boys, painters such as Arnulf Rainer, Josef Mikl, Markus Prachensky, who produced a Viennese variant of abstract art under the tutelage of the churchman Monsignor Otto Mauer and exhibited it in his St. Stephan Gallery. Although women in this circle were generally only tolerated as friends or as an aesthetic embellishment, in 1961, at the age of 26, Kiki Kogelnik received a solo exhibition that certainly attracted attention. Her pictures from this period combined brightly colored circles and round shapes that look like archaic emblems and breathe the zeitgeist of the fifties. But even before this first success had any effect, Kogelnik, on the advice of her partner at the time, the painter Sam Francis, decided emigrate to New York. There, in the metropolis of contemporary art, she found herself and her own style. The artist, who set out from Bleiburg to conquer the world, frequented Andy Warhol's Factory like so many others – this too was a predominantly gay men's association, in which women were not disliked, but at best the price won for best supporting role.

A standout artist in Cecilia Alemani’s marvelous “The Milk of Dreams” exhibition in this year’s Venice Biennale, where she has a whole wall full of paintings, the Austrian painter and sculptor Kiki Kogelnik got her start as an abstract artist in Vienna. By the 1960s, however, she had found her way to New York, where she added Pop Art references to her colorful canvases, and later took another turn toward more feminist subject matter in the 1970s.

Mitchell-Innes and Nash’s second solo presentation of Kiki Kogelnik comes on the heels of the artist’s posthumous inclusion in the current Venice Biennale. It features 10 of her graphic, boldly colorful paintings and 21 works on paper, dating from 1962 to 1985. Kogelnik’s depictions of women seemingly in search of personal determination were inspired by her own struggles as a woman artist, such as when she and her fiance, artist Arnulf Rainer, moved in together and she was relegated to the attic, while he got a whole floor as a studio.

Born in Austria, Kiki Kogelnik (1935–1997) moved to NYC in 1961, just as Pop Art was starting to take off. While her oeuvre is generally associated with that genre, it wasn’t about the cartoons, product brands, celebrities, advertising and other subjects associated with Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, etc. Rather, her paintings and sculpture bounced off of couture design for sly observations on gender and the constraints imposed on women by culture and commerce. Bodily silhouettes in punchy colors were a frequent motif, whether they were painted into overlapping compositions that combined figures and geometric patterns, or cut out of vinyl sheets before being draped on hangers or pipe racks like so many pieces of shmatte or flayed skin to suggest the ways that culture uses up and disposes of women’s bodies. During her lifetime, Kogelnik struggled to be recognized, but as this show proves, her work has begun to earn posthumous acclaim for its piquant feminist commentary.

This first presentation by Mitchell-Innes & Nash of Kiki Kogelnik’s work at their Chelsea space includes several of the artist’s colourful, large-scale paintings of women from the early 1960s and ’70s – many of which also feature the circuit boards and wires of the new technology that she found so fascinating. A later sculpture, Divided Souls (c.1986), extends the paintings into real life: female silhouettes cut from vinyl dangle from clothes hangers on a metal garment rack. Evoking the flayed skins of martyred saints, like Michelangelo’s depiction of St. Bartholomew in The Last Judgement (1536–41), they’re a reminder that, despite its Pop sensibilities, the late Austrian painter’s work was always marked by ambivalence.

Don’t miss Mitchell-Innes and Nash’s first solo show for artist Kiki Kogelnik (1935–1997), whose feminist take on Pop art often reduces the human form into colorful silhouettes. Paintings and sculptures from the early 1960s to the late ’80s reflect the post-war era, with all its technological advancement and political instability, as experienced by an Austrian artist who spent most of her life in New York City.

This Austrian artist, who spent most of her life in New York—she died in 1997, at the age of sixty-two—brought the ebullience of Pop to her Cold War critique of advertising culture. The result is serrated gaiety. This delightful show gathers works from the early sixties to the late eighties, including a wealth of colorful canvases, a cartoony ceramic bust with enormous sunglasses, and a rolling clothes rack hung with silhouetted figures cut out of vinyl. The painting “City,” from 1979, retains the glamour of the fashion spreads from which it probably borrowed its chic women in green ensembles. Nothing seems amiss about the models, who are set against an expertly unfussy trompe-l’oeil marble backdrop—until, that is, you notice that they have glowing voids in lieu of eyes. The sculpture “Bombs in Love,” from 1962, is pointedly saccharine: two brightly painted missile casings adorned with plastic heart baubles snuggle up together, as if to say, Make love, not war.

Kiki Kogelnik, who was born in Austria and who, before her death in 1997, was active in New York, liked to put the human body in silhouette. In her painting “Friends,” a handful of bright figures, some missing a head or limb or with large circles cut right through their torsos, are thrown across a jazzy background. In “Hands,” she painted a group of dismembered arms and legs spread out like letters in a printer’s tray, and for “Divided Souls,” she cut figures out of black and white vinyl and hung them on a garment rack. The woman striking a pose in “Dynamite Darling,” the highlight of Kogelnik’s first show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, isn’t technically a silhouette because she isn’t a monochrome, but she’s definitely flat.

Chic, colorful, and undeniably contemporary, the paintings and sculpture of this Austrian artist could easily find a broad audience beyond the insular art world. Crackling with feminist wit and energy, the works are enigmatic yet accessible. Josephine Nash, of Mitchell-Innes & Nash, has been heartened by reactions to Kogelnik’s works at fairs like Frieze New York; she’s gearing up for the gallery’s first solo exhibition of the artist, opening May 23. 

Like other mid-century Pop artists, Kiki Kogelnik became a brand. And while the Austrian-born artist should primarily be remembered for her innovative “Hangings” series and her bold feminist motifs, history hasn’t been kind to her. In the United States, Kogelnik’s legacy unfairly rests more on her fashionable image and vibrant personality than on her work itself.

I’ve chosen to focus primarily on works Kogelnik produced in the 1960s and 1970s. I find her preoccupation with technology, new materials, and body politics during that period way ahead of its time. I became really fascinated with her cyborgian works, such as Plug-in Hand (ca. 1967) and Human Spare Part (ca. 1968), both polyurethane hand sculptures with technologies embedded—a telephone handle and an electrical plug—as well as the vinyl Hangings, which allude to a future where bodies can be taken on and off.

Kiki Kogelnik, who passed away almost exactly twenty years ago, on February 1st 1997, staged her artificial appearance as part of a complex artistic overall strategy that focussed on the inseparable connection of life and art. Quite naturally, the multifaceted, versatile artist attached the same importance to the performative “self imaging“ and “self fashioning“ as to her artistic work, which explicitly cannot be reduced to disciplines and categories. “Kiki is an original. Her style is part bohemian, part film star, part intellectual” Robert Fulford stated in the “Toronto Daily Star“ in 1964.

From its inception in the early 1960s, Pop Art was a boys’ club. Huge names like Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann
perpetuated the myth of the (male) artist-as-genius. The movement emerged amid the post-World War II explosions of capitalist consumerism and mass media, as artists explored new modes of mechanical production, often by taking commonplace consumer goods and pop-cultural icons as their subject matter. Associated with an unemotional, distanced attitude toward artmaking, Pop Art’s codified characteristics are, in turn, stereotypically male.

After a stint in California, Kogelnik—already a relatively accomplished abstract painter by her mid-20s—relocated to New York in 1961. It was a life-changing move. Not long after settling in her adopted city, Kogelnik met and befriended Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg, whose collective influence on her was profound. While Kogelnik didn’t become a Pop Art painter herself, she took inspiration from many of the genre’s defining elements: figurative compositions, bold colors, and subjects that reflect contemporary culture.

Kiki Kogelnik in 1966, Kogelnik said, "I'm not involved with Coca-Cola...I'm involved in the technical beauty of rockets," effectively distancing herself from Pop art. She was fascinated by the possibilities of the space age, with its new technologies and innovations in materials. 

“FLY ME TO THE MOON,” Britain’s first Kiki Kogelnik retrospective, complemented Tate Modern’s revisionist and staccato survey “The World Goes Pop.” Coinciding with Modern Art Oxford’s exhibition, Tate Modern showcased the work of female Pop artists who had been rediscovered during the past decade, including Kogelnik herself. 

Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. The giants of post-war American art are being reviewed once again; their replacement of high art with kitsch, brushstroke with Ben-Day dot and abstract expressionism with advertising is eerily prophetic of the current state of affairs. During its first lifetime, pop was maligned for glorifying consumerism; it has now been revised to acknowledge the biting cynicism that bristled beneath the smiles of Hollywood goddesses and the shiny veneer of muscle cars.

Regardless, the legacy of omission has continued unabated, as the largely unknown name Kiki Kogelnik (1935-1997) will attest. A contemporary of the aforementioned postmodern practitioners, the Austrian- born artist’s retrospective at Modern Art Oxford showed before several of her works go on display in The World Goes Pop exhibition opening at Tate Modern later this month.

This is Skull, a vinyl hanging assembled around 1970 by a little-known Austrian artist named Kiki Kogelnik. She was active in New York in the 1960s and 70s, straddling Pop art and feminism, and died in 1997. Her work is now having its second solo outing at Simone Subal Gallery in New York. What particularly intrigues me about this work by Kogelnik is its unique mix of goofy 1960s optimism (in its materials and forms) and bodily threat (in its subject matter). Come to think of it, that’s exactly where you’d imagine a smart feminist to be taking Pop art.

Two silhouettes cut from sheet vinyl, one black, one butterscotch, hang from two coat hangers that are looped through wire to the canvas’s upmost edge. Slung against an acrylic gradient (pink-rimmed azure melted in lavender), each silhouette traces the contours of a body once full but now flayed: an enervated membrane, all surface and no sex. Sterile yet strangely seductive, like moltings from a space being, they treat the body as schema or sieve, limp and radically inorganic.

“I’m not involved with Coca-Cola,” Kiki Kogelnik avowed in 1966, marking her distance from Pop art, or at least its consumerist strains. But making the association was sensible enough. After moving to New York in 1961 (encouraged by Sam Francis, whom she’d met in Venice), the Austrian artist befriended Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein, and visited Warhol’s Factory; her early stateside output—in painting, drawing, prints, and sculpture—admits Benday dots and spray paint, flattened forms and jazzed up surfaces.

Kogelnik began her career as a gestural painter, showing in Vienna with the likes of Arnulf Rainer. After mov- ing to New York in 1960, she abandoned abstraction, a decision reinforced by encounters and subsequent friend- ships with heavyweight figures on the burgeoning Pop art scene such as Roy Lichtenstein, OÌ?yvind FahlstroÌ?m and Claes Oldenburg. By the early 1960s she was mak- ing figurative paintings, drawings and assemblages that combine Pop art’s immediacy, industrial techniques and materials, as well as concern for Suzi Gablik’s “surrogate world of the mass media,” with the allusiveness of Dada and Surrealist montage—notably Picabia’s mechanomorphic figures—Machine Age idealism and the formalism of European modernist abstraction and design.

Kiki Kogelnik, an artist known for rakish depictions of figures and heads, died on Saturday at the Vienna Private Clinic. She was 62 and had homes and studios in Vienna, New York and Bleiburg in southern Austria.