Kiki Kogelnik

Kiki Kogelnik was born on January 22, 1935, in Graz, Austria. She studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (or Academy of Fine Arts Vienna). Kogelnik moved to New York City in 1962. ==Life and work: 1960s==

Kogelnik began her career at the Galerie Nächst St. Stephan in Vienna in 1961, showing abstract works. At the time she was influenced by Serge Poliakoff of the École de Paris, but later found her own unique genre while surrounded by the pop art movement in New York. At one point she was engaged to Austrian abstract expressionist artist Arnulf Rainer. Kogelnik was close to another abstract expressionist, the American artist Sam Francis, and spent time with him in 1961 in New York and Santa Monica, California. Kogelnik then moved to New York in 1962 where she joined a close-knit group of artists that included Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, Tom Wesselmann, Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, among others. Pop was a way of life and, with her extravagant hats and outfits, Kogelnik became a captivating happening wherever she went. Her work during that time was strongly influenced by the pop art colors and materials of the time, producing numerous brightly colored euphoric space-themed paintings. Unlike pop artists, she avoided the celebration of commerce or quotidian objects, although she was known to foreground plastics and the artificial over nature. During the early 1960s Kogelnik began to use life-size cutout paper stencils of her friends to produce her paintings. In 1965 these prototype cut-outs became vinyl hangings, presented on the same clothing racks that she saw pushed down the streets in the vicinity of her studio in New York's garment district. While Kogelnik was in London in 1966, her New York studio space was engulfed in an enormous fire. Although Kogelnik had just moved out prior to the fire, her downstairs neighbor, American artist Alfred Leslie, lost his entire artistic output. That same year, Kogelnik married radiation oncologist Dr. George Schwarz in London, giving birth to her son Mono in 1967, returning to New York shortly thereafter. In 1969, Kogelnik created a Moonhappening during the lunar landing of Apollo 11 at the Galerie Nächst St. Stephan in Vienna, producing a series of lunar-themed silkscreens during the live broadcast. ==1970s and later==

In the 1970s Kogelnik's focus shifted to what later became known as her Women works, specifically addressing the female role portrayed in commercial advertising. Broaching feminist issues indirectly with irony, humor and a cool pop aesthetic was unique to Kogelnik's work during this time. In 1974 she also began to work occasionally with ceramics, employing sculptural form as an extension of painting. In the 1980s, Kogelnik establishing dedicated spaces in her studios in New York and Bleiburg for ceramics. In 1982, Christian Michelides presented her ceramics at Villa Vojcsik in the XIVth district of Vienna. In the 1980s, fragmented people, signs and symbols begin to fill Kogelnik's work and in her Expansions series she used ceramic modules shown in conjunction with her paintings. She also produced and directed a short 16mm B&W film CBGB in 1978, featuring Jim Carroll and others. In later works, the human body is depicted in increasingly fragmented and manipulated form, until in the 1990s much of her work portrayed highly abstracted yet expressive faces. During this time Kogelnik created a series of glass sculptures, related drawings and prints, in which she sought to comment on decorative and commercial themes in art-making. ==Death and legacy==

Kiki Kogelnik died of cancer on February 1, 1997, in Vienna. ==See also==

• Christa Zetter (ed.): KIKI KOGELNIK – 1234567, Galerie bei der Albertina 1991, ISBN 3-85415-090-3 • Kiki Kogelnik: Expansions, Ernst Múzeum, Budapest 1993 • Florian Waldvogel (ed.): Kiki Kogelnik: I have seen the future!, Kunstverein Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3864420245 • Dana Miller (ed.): Kiki Kogelnik Paperback, Mitchell-Innes & Nash 2020, ISBN 978-0998631288 • Kiki Kogelnik: Monographie, Ritter, ISBN 978-3854150756 ==References==