Kiki Kogelnik: The Dance

Kogelnik’s singular visual language of weightless bodies, geometric repetition, and vibrant, neon colours defies categorisation. Born in Austria in 1935, she relocated to New York in the early 196Os, where she was introduced to artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Tom Wesselmann. Charged by the city’s artistic vitality-set against the pervasive background of the Cold War and Space Race-Kogelnik’s practice surged into a prolific phase of creative development. Alongside her distinctive ‘Kiki’ style of painting, her assemblages proposed mechanical augmentation of the body as a means of survival, using novel materials such as sheet vinyl, plastics, and fibreglass. A shift in Kogelnik’s work throughout the course of the 197Os and 8Os saw her treatment of the female body become more pronounced, concurrent with her growing dissatisfaction of the artistic scene’s ‘boys club’. With dynamic fluidity across paintings, works on paper, and ceramics, her explicit commentaries on the representations of women in modern society are imbued with an irony, critique, and pessimism that diverge ideologically from the canonical Pop art of her counterparts.

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