Kiki Kogelnik (1935–1997) is one of the most important Austrian-born artists of the 20th century, who lived and worked on an international level. Today, the artist is considered the only Austrian protagonist of Pop Art, but her art goes far beyond this categorization. Kogelnik's playful, colorful, and highly political work ranges from painting, drawing, ceramics and installation to performative practices, and has an astonishing topicality in terms of its subject matter. In spring 2023, the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien will show the largest solo presentation of this outstanding artist to date.
Having completed her studies at the Academy of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the 1950s, Kogelnik was part of the young St. Stephan Group. After extensive travels through Europe and through her acquaintance with Sam Francis, Kogelnik relocated to New York in 1962, where she began to work within the newly forming Pop Art movement and developed friendships with artists such as Roy Liechtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and Carolee Schneemann. This extremely incisive period at the beginning of the 1960s also signified a reorientation in her artistic work – the works created during this phase form the crucial center of the exhibition.
The artist explicitly addressed her interest in, but also her critical attitude towards, consumer society, technical progress, medicine and diagnostics, and the (female) body and its implications, as well as the reality of her own life as an artist, mother, and wife, starting in the early 1960s – long before today's omnipresent discourses on gender equality, medical ethics, the digital age, and sustainable lifestyles. With humor, sharp punchlines, the bold aesthetic and sense of mission of pop and new materials such as vinyl, Kiki Kogelnik finds her unique way and, from today's perspective, proves to be one of the most diverse and independent examples of early postmodern art.
The exhibition project is generously supported by the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation and is a cooperation with the Brandts Art Museum in Odense, Denmark, as well as the Kunsthaus Zürich, where the show will also be on view after its stop in Vienna - once again living up to the Bank Austria Kunstforum's reputation of offering artistic pioneers an international stage.
Curated by Lisa Ortner-Kreil
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.
