Kiki Kogelnik
ABC
Artist
Kiki Kogelnik
(1935, Bleiburg - 1997, Wien), Austrian
Original Title
ABC
Date1960-1963
Mediumacrylic and oil on canvas
Dimensions 180 × 120 cm
Classifications
paintings
Credit LineKunsthalle Praha
CopyrightCopyright Kiki Kogelnik Foundation; credit line: Courtesy of Kiki Kogelnik Foundation
DescriptionKiki Kogelnik preferably uses the human figure as a basic element in her art. She applied the human body in painting, prints or drawings as life-size-vinyls or cut-outs as traces of her model bodies. Although she was involved in the New York Pop- Art scene, her work is distinguished by the fact that she did not draw directly from commercial products for her artistic content. Rather she displayed human shapes and plane colours and created works about emerging technologies such as space travel. In the 1960s, within a predominantly male art scene, she did not thematise advertising and consumerism like her collegues but rather worked from a feminist perspective. In her work she went beyond the movements of European abstract modernism and American Pop Art towards a singular oeuvre that thematised technology and feminism. Including various materials and humor, her paintings and sculptures characteristically took their cue from the human shape.
In the context of Pop Art, female artists often carried on a subversive dialogue with consumer culture which produced feminist and essentially deconstructive effects. The voice of female subjectivity exposed the purely patriarchal approach through female embodiment, and by strategically transvaluating pop pleasure, they artistically articulated a variety of transgressive feminist concerns – the most prominent being the retrieval of female sexuality and pleasure from its silencing in western culture. For Kogelnik, the theme of outer space relates to a utopian space of liberated sexuality. Depersonalisation – as there are no faces – resonates with the post-war fear of losing oneself which has to do with the effects of capitalism, corporations, consumerism and mass media.
The coloured composition mixes fragments of the female body with various decorative abstract brush strokes and shapes. In contrast to general American Pop Art influenced by visuality of mass distributed and mechanically reproduced images, her painting style shows a much more expressive account with traces of European Informalism. We find the plane-oriented language of Pop Art in the morphological reduction and in her manner of layering the individual planes. Kogelnik thus shows a way out by creating a work which is different in content, thematising questions of individuality and female embodiment, through which she distances herself from Pop Art‘s consumer fetishism and cult of personality.
Kiki Kogelnik (1935, Bleiburg – 1997, Vienna) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. During her studies and in the late 1950s she worked with the gestural abstract style as many European artists of that period. In 1961, Kogelnik moved to New York and became involved in the Pop Art movement and met Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. In 1998, the Vienna-based Belveder organised a retrospective which was reprised in Cologne and Weimar.
In the context of Pop Art, female artists often carried on a subversive dialogue with consumer culture which produced feminist and essentially deconstructive effects. The voice of female subjectivity exposed the purely patriarchal approach through female embodiment, and by strategically transvaluating pop pleasure, they artistically articulated a variety of transgressive feminist concerns – the most prominent being the retrieval of female sexuality and pleasure from its silencing in western culture. For Kogelnik, the theme of outer space relates to a utopian space of liberated sexuality. Depersonalisation – as there are no faces – resonates with the post-war fear of losing oneself which has to do with the effects of capitalism, corporations, consumerism and mass media.
The coloured composition mixes fragments of the female body with various decorative abstract brush strokes and shapes. In contrast to general American Pop Art influenced by visuality of mass distributed and mechanically reproduced images, her painting style shows a much more expressive account with traces of European Informalism. We find the plane-oriented language of Pop Art in the morphological reduction and in her manner of layering the individual planes. Kogelnik thus shows a way out by creating a work which is different in content, thematising questions of individuality and female embodiment, through which she distances herself from Pop Art‘s consumer fetishism and cult of personality.
Kiki Kogelnik (1935, Bleiburg – 1997, Vienna) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. During her studies and in the late 1950s she worked with the gestural abstract style as many European artists of that period. In 1961, Kogelnik moved to New York and became involved in the Pop Art movement and met Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. In 1998, the Vienna-based Belveder organised a retrospective which was reprised in Cologne and Weimar.
